The EuroMaidan Revolution was successful in terms of ousting disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his cronies, and shifting Ukraine back toward the path of European integration, according to a significant majority of 31 experts polled this month by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation policy center.
However,
two years later, the revolution’s other goals have not been achieved, namely
eradicating systemic corruption and punishing those guilty of crimes.
These
failures could lead to the undoing of the current government, led by President
Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, because public trust in
them is low, Iryna Bekeshkina, director of the Democratic Initiatives, said at
a roundtable to discuss the expert poll’s findings in Kyiv on Oct. 20.
Authorities
haven’t brought one conviction related to crimes committed during the Maidan,
including killings of protesters, torture, police brutality, abuse of power,
Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office announced this week in a series of briefings.
The
situation reminded Bekeshkina of the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in
2004, a peaceful uprising that reversed a rigged presidential election that
favored Yanukovych. Afterward, Freedom House elevated Ukraine’s status to being
a “free country,” yet the nation remained extremely corrupt, according to
Transparency International.
Ukraine is
in the same precarious position today, Bekeshkina said. More than 70 percent of
Ukrainians believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction, Social
Monitoring found in a separate nationwide public opinion conducted earlier this
month.
“This
(current) regime isn’t sustainable. They must act fast because what’s needed is
painful and it will affect their close ones, their relatives and friends,” she
said of the urgency to combat corruption. “(Public) trust towards government is
falling rapidly, this is very dangerous, but it is still not that high as
during the Maidan.”
Iryna Bekeshkina, director of the Democratic Initiatives policy center.
What also
is needed is for parliament to pass legislation in line with the revolution’s
goal of “democratization,” Kyiv Mohyla Academy political science professor
Oleksiy Haran said at the discussion.
“We need a
‘Maidan’ in parliament to pass the necessary laws, that’s the path we need to
take…we need civic activists who can write specific laws related to sectoral
changes and then lobby them to fruition,” Haran said, who was one of the
experts polled.
He lamented
that that civic activists from the revolution didn’t form their own party in
the movement’s aftermath and instead joined existing parties.
“They did
this for pragmatic reasons because they feared the new party wouldn’t have
passed the 5-percent threshold” in the October 2014 parliamentary election,
Haran said.
A new
political nation is emerging following the revolution, the poll found among its
positive outcomes, in addition to “growth of national consciousness” and
heightened civic activity and volunteering.
On the
negative side, Russia’s aggression and war against Ukraine was the most
frequently mentioned by experts, including the loss of “territorial integrity.”
Experts
were roughly divided in half on whether a third mass uprising, or Maidan III,
could erupt in the near future.
Foremost
among the reasons given for another popular uprising to occur is the “lack of
progress with the implementation of essential reforms and corresponding
tangible changes in the lives of ordinary citizens.”
To this
end, according to Haran, thanks to changes brought on by the revolution, “no
branch of government can ignore pressure from civil society or the public
(anymore)…this is revolutionary.”
Kyiv Post editor
Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected]
