Standing side by side on a stage in front of a crowd of supporters on Sunday afternoon, the three opposition leaders hailed the release from jail of political heavyweight Yuriy Lutsenko.
A top political prisoner
just days ago, Lutsenko has now strengthened the opposition and has
given a hope that change will eventually come in the nation.
But what was left behind
the scene is a new set of challenges Lutsenko might also bring to the
shaky alliance between Arseniy Yatseniuk of Batkivshchyna Party,
Vitali Klitschko of Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform and Oleg
Tiahnybok of far-right Svoboda.
Until his criminal record
is erased, Lutsenko will not be able to take part in either
parliamentary, or presidential elections, but as a person who spent
833 days in jail for political convictions, he will still change the
status quo among the leaders, experts say.
“A generation
of opposition leaders has
changed by now,” said political
technologist Taras Berezovets. “Lutsenko and (Yulia) Tymoshenko in
fact have gone, and Lutsenko’s comeback ruins the matrix of
relations inside of the opposition.”
Lutsenko came out of
prison on April 7, courtesy of President Viktor Yanukovych’s pardon
for health reasons.
His release comes at a
very hard time for the opposition indeed. Last week, the opposition
lost most of its leverage in parliament when the pro-presidential
majority comprised of the Party of Regions, Communist Party and
non-aligned deputies suddenly moved the session outside the
designated hall of parliament and rubber-stamped 20 laws in just a
few hours, many in the final reading.
The opposition’s biggest
faction Batkivshchyna lost four lawmakers on that day who defected
to the majority, a move that indicated that the chaos inside this
party created from splinters of others, is deepening. Add to that
mutual dislike of some of the opposition leaders, a lack of common
strategy and presidential ambitions of many in the opposition camp
(not just the leaders).
Lutsenko will be bringing
more ingredients to this concoction.
“I don’t claim to be
the main one, I just claim to be the one who knows much and may
advise much,” Lutsenko said in his first television interview on
TVi channel on April 8. In a group where everyone thinks along those
lines, his advice might not be well received.
Lutsenko mentioned in his
interview people like Roman Bezsmertny and Taras Stetskiv, two
prominent figures during the 2004 Orange Revolution, who were sent to
political oblivion when the opposition failed to find prominent space
for them on the Batkivshchyna Party list before the Oct. 28
parliamentary election, and they failed to get in.
At the same time, the exit
of four deputies from the same faction – Vitaliy Nemylostyvyi, Roman
Stadniychuk, Oleh Kanivets and Ihor Skosar — has further hit the
faction and its leadership. It did not help that Kanivets and Skosar
said that they put the blame on Yatseniuk, saying he is a “one-man
show,” as they banged the door.
Anatoliy Hrytsenko,
Yatseniuk’s long-time critic (and rival) in the faction, said the
leader has to bear responsibility for bringing defectors to the
party. On top of the four recent ones, Hrytsenko meant Oleksandr and
Andriy Tabalovs, a father and son team who refused to complete the
formality of joining Batkivshchyna faction in parliament, despite
being elected on party ticket. On April 8 Andriy Tabalov released a
letter saying he was ready to return to Batkivshchyna “if Yatseniuk
resigns as faction leader.”
Yatseniuk remained unfazed
and blamed the turbulence on tricks of Andriy Kliuyev, head of the
Council of National Security and Defense, who has great authority
over the parliament’s majority, with the purpose to oust him from
leadership in the faction.
Volodymyr Fesenko says
there is merit to the conspiracy. “He (Yatseniuk) left himself
wide open when he took unreliable people in his party list, and they
(the authorities) now use it,” he said.
He expects more defectors
soon – but not just in Batkivshchyna, but also in UDAR and Svoboda,
the seemingly most monolithic party in the oppositional bloc. Other
observers said five people are preparing to defect UDAR, and three
have already filed papers to that effect, which may be announced at
the next parliament session later this week.
The defection would be a
major blow to UDAR, which only has 42 people. The whole opposition
bloc has 173 deputies at the moment.
The explanation behind the
potential defections in UDAR go back to power fights among the top
dogs in the ruling clans, though. UDAR, which is considered to have
ties with chief of the President’s Administration Serhiy Lyovochkin,
is being targeted by rival clans, including the president’s son,
Oleksandr Yanukovych. UDAR lawmaker Pavlo Rozenko refuted the talks
about potential defectors as “nonsense,” though.
As a moral authority with
no ambitions for elected offices (at the moment), Lutsenko has the
ability to stabilize the demoralized opposition camp. Having no party
of his own to speak of, Lutsenko announced that he plans to work on
creation of a new unity among the existing three.
“Today Ukraine needs
all-Ukrainian over-party movement that will be, if needed, pushing
the opposition to take the right decisions,” Lutsenko told TVi.
He also urged Yatseniuk,
Klitschko and Tiahnybok to make decision by the middle of the next
year about which one of them will be the candidate for presidential
elections in 2015. Good luck to him on that, says Fesenko. He
believes that the more likely scenario is that all three will want
his endorsement, with no strings attached.
Kyiv Post staff writer
Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
