President sinks as early vote challenged

Canyon-deep disappointment with Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko has people talking about whether his political career is over. Others, however, caution that Yushchenko – despite sinking to all-time lows in popularity polls – could still be a viable force.

The nation’s beleaguered voters may decide soon enough whether to write Yushchenko’s political obituary, after the president dissolved parliament and called for election of a new Verkhovna Rada on Dec. 7. As the week progressed, however, politicians couldn’t even agree on whether to obey Yushchenko’s decree on new elections.

People on the streets make no effort to conceal their contempt for politicians in general and the president in particular. Yushchenko’s split with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his former 2004 Orange Revolution ally, led to the collapse of the ruling coalition in parliament in September. The president dissolved parliament on Oct. 8.

Alla Alimova, a pensioner, voted for Yushchenko as president in 2004 and for his parliamentary bloc in 2006 and 2007. But she will never again. “Yushchenko should be thinking about how to deal with the economic crisis, but his only goal is to punish the girl [Tymoshenko] who refused to act as he wants,” Alimova said.

The president was reduced this week to scrambling for cash to finance the early election, after Tymoshenko flat-out refused to finance the poll by authorizing the expenditure of $85 million (Hr 417 million) from the Cabinet’s emergency fund.

“When every kopeck is accounted for, when every hryvnia is critical to act against the world financial crisis, spending half a billion hryvnias on a reckless election is nothing other than acting against the national interest,” Tymoshenko said on Oct.15. “An early election is a disaster for Ukraine and there is no logic in financing it. The reserve fund is intended to overcome natural disasters, not create them.”

Tymoshenko was fighting legal battles trying to cancel – or at least to postpone – the election because she is given little chance of remaining prime minister after a new parliament is elected. A Kyiv judge suspended the presidential decree, which prompted Yushchenko to fire the judge and dismiss his court. A higher court reversed the Kyiv court’s ruling. More hearings are due.

Olena Shustik, a lawmaker from the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, known by the BYuT acronym, said that the Counstitutional Court should rule on the presidential dissolution of parliament. “If the court decision is to hold elections, BYuT will agree with it,” Shustik said.

Oleksandr Chernenko, an election expert with the non-governmental organization Committee of Voters of Ukraine, predicts that elections will be held in late December or early January. “Tymoshenko will finally agree to hold elections, but the bargaining process will take time,” he said.

Amid all this chaos, some voices are calling for two simultaneous elections – one for president, the other for parliament. The next scheduled presidential vote is not supposed to take place until 2010.

Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first president, said on Oct. 9 that voters should also be allowed to choose a new president along with the next parliament. Otherwise, the country can expect more of the same political bickering, Kravchuk said. Early presidential elections “will put an end to the cycle of repeat elections…it will help Ukraine save face in the world and help save parliamentarianism in Ukraine,” he said.

As president, Kravchuk called for pre-term parliamentary and presidential elections in the fall of 1993, when the country was gripped by multiple crises of striking miners, hyperinflation and Crimean separatism. The elections were held just three months apart in 1994, when Kravchuk lost to the nation’s second president, Leonid Kuchma, who stayed in power until 2005.

Yushchenko, the nation’s third president, may repeat history if a presidential election is held soon. His popularity is at an all-time low, with only 6.8 percent of people willing to re-elect him as president in September, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

His ratings keep plummeting as he remains locked in bitter fights with Tymoshenko, who also has presidential ambitions. Tymoshenko, by contrast, enjoys the support of 25 percent of voters, according to the same poll of 2,036 people across the country.

With poll numbers like that, it’s no wonder that Tymoshenko fans are talking up the benefits of an early presidential poll. “Holding pre-term presidential elections makes sense as 75 percent don’t trust Yushchenko,” said Taras Berezovets, a political consultant who has worked on Tymoshenko campaigns.

But Yushchenko’s advisers say an early presidential poll won’t happen. “This is political speculation. Everybody knows that Ukrainian legislation doesn’t allow two elections in one year,” said Volodymyr Tsybulko, a Yushchenko consultant.

Contrary to opinion polls that suggest Yushchenko’s political obituary will soon be written, some analysts believe the president could be re-elected in 2010.

But the only path to staying in power may be for Yushchenko to ride the back of the Party of Regions, his bitter enemies from the days of the 2004 Orange Revolution.

This is how the situation could play out in Yushchenko’s favor, according to analyst Serhiy Taran: The snap Dec. 7 parliamentary elections will result in a Yushchenko-loyal majority, combined with the Party of the Regions. Regions leader Victor Yanukovych was declared winner of the rigged 2004 election that sparked the Orange Revolution. Yanukovych’s faction has the support of about 24 percent now. If this scenario plays out as the president might hope, Yanukovych would then be appointed prime minister by Yushchenko in exchange for a promise not to challenge the president’s re-election in 2010.

“It’s too early to call Yushchenko the pilot of a crashed plane,” agreed Viktor Chumak, another political analyst.