Ukraine's parliament failed to convene after a long winter break on Feb. 5 due to disagreement between the majority and the opposition on personal voting by the deputies.
This constitutional demand –
that lawmakers must cast their votes only for themselves, not colleagues — has
for years been ignored by the pro-presidential majority.
This unconstitutional
practice has infuriated voters and made Ukraine’s 450-member Verkhovna Rada the
butt of jokes worldwide. It has bolstered criticism that the legislative body is
a rubber-stamp institution whose members are not accountable to the people who
elected them and don’t take responsibility for their actions.
In Ukraine, deputies who
pressed buttons for colleagues were nicknamed “pianists” or “button-pushers.” A
public campaign for personal voting activated before the Oct. 28 parliamentary
election, in which the opposition captured 40 percent of the seats, and the
momentum is carried on by the three opposition factions in the new year.
On Feb. 5, the opposition
showed up in the session hall early and well-prepared. Vitali Klitschko’s
faction UDAR turned up in similar red sweatshirts in support of personal voting
by deputies. With the help of Batkivshchyna and Svoboda, they hung up banners
with slogans like “No to button pushers!” and “Deputy, come to work! Vote
personally!” One of the posters had a picture of a guillotine hanging
dangerously over a hand, another one – a bleeding, chopped-off hand.
The deputies from the
majority did not seem to be put off, though. They walked about visibly in a
good mood, joked with colleagues about the opposition’s initiatives, and
started to leave parliament half an hour after the scheduled start of the
session, assuming that it would not start at all.
Speaker Volodymyr Rybak
said the majority deputies “showed up, but were not permitted to work,” so they
left the parliament building. He said only two majority deputies failed to show
up for the session because they’re sick.
Oleh Tiahnybok, leader of the
opposition Svoboda Party, explained at a briefing that the opposition “do not
consider it expedient to start the session until the sensor button is
activated.” The button, which requires a fingerprint to register a vote, was
installed in the Rada when Arseniy Yatseniuk was speaker in 2007-2008.
Tiahnybok said the
pro-government party is “afraid of personal voting” and coming up with excuses,
such as the voting system is bad for the deputies’ health.
Rybak lashed out at the
opposition for disrupting the session and failing to compromise on personal
voting, and refusing to unblock the podium.
“The laws that I propose to
vote on today, there is one that contains the issue of fingerprint voting,..
but the Rada hall continues to be blocked,” Rybak complained at a briefing.
Yatseniuk, leader of
Batkivshchyna, the biggest oppositional minority faction, said that personal
voting “is not an ultimatum of the opposition, this is a demand of the
Ukrainian Constitution and Ukrainian people.”
Yatseniuk said that if the
fingerprint voting system truly does not work or is not suitable for the ruling
pro-presidential Party of Regions, the opposition is ready to move to old-style
voting, casting ballots with a show of hands.
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].
