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Verkhovna Rada – once again- demonstrated irresponsibility by approving populist wage increases and failing to lift deputies’ immunity.

Just one day after the Oct. 19 kickoff of the presidential election campaign, lawmakers wasted little time in showing how fiscally irresponsible and duplicitous they can be. Even the visiting International Monetary Fund delegation, now in Kyiv to decide whether to grant another $4 billion in loans, has expressed “concern” about the randy populism. Let’s also hope that President Victor Yushchenko will heed Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s call to veto this recent budget-busting bill.

Legislators from all parties except Tymoshenko’s camp voted for an unaffordable increase in the national minimum wage, a basic figure for calculating salaries for public employees and pensions. The minimum wage is set to grow gradually from the current Hr 869 to Hr 922 by December 2010, still not much more than $100 monthly.

“There are no revenues to finance such expenditures,” said deputy finance minister Volodymyr Matviychuk. The increases – backed by the parties of Victor Yanukovych, Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko and a portion of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine – are transparently unjustifiable attempts to win voter favor ahead of the Jan. 17 presidential contest.

Ukraine’s minimum wage is far short of adequate, but raising it even by a modest amount is simply not possible for a recession-plagued nation going deeper into debt. If signed into law by Yushchenko, the bill will cost Ukraine’s government nearly $10 billion next year. Without adequate tax revenue to cover these costs, the government can balance the budget only by laying off 1.6 million people who rely on state salaries, including doctors and teachers.

Meanwhile, lawmakers also this week cynically imitated action in a so-called attempt to strip their legal immunity from prosecution. Nearly 390 of 450 parliamentary deputies gave preliminary approval for a bill that would bring them (as well as the president and the judges) one step closer to being equal in the eyes of the law with Ukraine’s 46 million citizens.

But instead of voting in the second reading for a similar law that has already been approved by the Constitutional Court, they approved new changes to the constitution that still need to be scrutinized by this court.

This means that the final vote, if it ever comes, will take place safely after the Jan. 17 presidential election. So, in the end, voters were misled into thinking that lawmakers are really trying to curtail their outrageous legal privileges. Citizens should not be fooled by these tricks and should demand that immunity be stripped as quickly as possible from lawmakers and everyone else who enjoys it, so the war against corruption and crime can truly begin.