If and when ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is released from prison, will she still have followers to lead?
The answer, of course, depends on when she is free again, if she will still have millions of supporters among voters and how devoted her eponymous BYuT minority faction in the 450-seat parliament will remain.
Despite growing international support for her release, Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party – which leads in the polls ahead of the Oct. 28 parliamentary election – has been losing lawmakers in the nation’s 450-seat legislature.
In the September 2007 parliamentary elections, the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko — or BYuT — won 156 seats in parliament. Since then, the faction has lost 53 members who switched alliances, shrinking to the current 103 deputies. Three left recently.
While this is hardly a large-scale exodus, the party is showing signs of division from within as the months go by since her August arrest and October conviction.
“The problem of the Fatherland party is that it is based on one leader. When we remove the leader we see the removal of the frame which held the party together,” said Oleksiy Haran, a political science professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.
Some lawmakers who switched from Tymoshenko’s faction in parliament to pro-presidential or neutral groups are tycoons. Quitting the ranks of the leading opposition party was a matter of survival for their business interests, analysts say.
Others are ideologues. Tymoshenko’s party has claimed that pro-presidential interests have been offering millions of dollars in political bribes to such lawmakers who agree to dump her faction in parliament. And on Feb. 8, longtime Tymoshenko ally Roman Zabzaliuk claimed to have produced first-hand proof of how such alleged political corruption works.
Last December, Zabzaliuk raised eyebrows in announcing that he, considered one of Tymoshenko’s most loyal lawmakers in parliament, had quit her faction to join the quasi centrist pro-presidential Reforms for the Future parliamentary group. During a Feb. 8 press conference, Zabzaliuk shocked Ukraine’s political establishment in claiming that his switch was part of an undercover investigation.
The purpose, he said, was to document how bribes are offered and given to lawmakers who quit Tymoshenko’s faction. According to Zabzaliuk, it’s all part of the attempt by President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration to discredit the political opposition and to lay the groundwork for electoral fraud in the coming parliamentary elections.
Late last year, Zabzaliuk said that he received almost half a million dollars for quitting BYuT and joining the Reforms for Future group from its eader and ex-BYuT deputy Ihor Rybakov.
In a statement, Rybakov refuted the allegations, insisting the recordings were fake and that he merely gave Zabzaliuk some money as a gift to help him get treatment abroad for a medical condition.
But to prove his case, Zabzaliuk, a lawmaker in Tymoshenko’s party, played an audio recording of conversations during a Feb. 8 press conference in which he allegedly discusses betraying Tymoshenko’s party with Rybakov in exchange for a payoff.
In the conversation, a voice resembling Rybakov offers money to someone sounding like Zabzaliuk for switching political sides and working to undermine BYuT.
Speaking during the press conference, Zabzaliuk said: “They offer money to sell your conscience. We are talking here about $500,000 in advance payment followed up by a monthly salary of $20,000-25,000 … plus bonuses for lies against the opposition.”
In one part of the audio recording demonstrated by Zabzaliuk, a voice resembling Rybakov is heard telling Zabzaliuk to get people loyal to the current authorities into election district commissions but identified as representatives as Tymoshenko’s party.
Admitting that he accepted nearly $500,000 from Rybakov as part of the would-be undercover sting operation, Zabzaliuk says that he will donate the bounty to Tymoshenko’s party coffers.
But Zabzaliuk’s story does not alone explain why dozens of former Tymoshenko allies, some considered very loyal, have quit the party.
One prominent politician who recently left Tymoshenko’s party is lawmaker Natalia Korolevska, known as much for her snappy sartorial style and good looks as for her political work. In a surprise move late last year, she joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party and was swiftly elected as its head.
The marginal party has over the years been an ally of Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party, and was previously headed by another Tymoshenko faction lawmaker, former deputy justice minister Yevhen Korniychuk.
Yevhen Suslov, formerly head of the youth arm of Tymoshenko’s party, and fellow lawmaker Oleksiy Lohvynenko, swiftly joined Korolevska’s party.
It remains unclear why Korolevska and others would quit Tymoshenko’s party, which currently leads in the polls, in favor of a little known party that is not considered likely to pass the 5 percent threshold needed to get lawmakers into parliament through the party-list mandate. Analysts and insiders suggest the move was driven by Korolevska’s ambition.
Oleksandr Turchynov, a former deputy prime minister who is now running the Fatherland party in Tymoshenko’s absence, says it takes courage to remain in the party because of the constant pressure and threat of political persecution from authorities.
“Not everyone can sustain the pressure and risk their lives and their freedom,” Turchynov said.
Political scientist Haran says Tymoshenko’s imprisonment will separate those who are true believers from those who simply joined to lobby for their businesses. “In the current situation it is hard for these people to remain in the opposition,” Haran said, referring to widespread allegations of political persecution of opposition politicians under Yanukovych’s rule.
Turchynov has long been Tymoshenko’s right-handed man. But his management style, allegedly an attempt to unilaterally run the party in Tymoshenko’s absence, has been criticized by some insiders.
“Some are not happy with Turchynov,” Haran said, adding that he is not charismatic.
When asked about divisions in the Fatherland party, Korolevska did not refute them, but added that she’ll try to have the problems “solved within the bloc.”
One clear-cut case of the divisions was exposed when part of the BYuT faction joined pro-presidential lawmakers in supporting a new election law that some critics say diminishes the chances of free and fair parliamentary elections on Oct. 28.
Turchynov supported the election law. Tymoshenko did not.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected].
