You're reading: Gridlock in parliament looks set to stay

Despite a number of optimistic declarations of the past two days that the pro-presidential majority and the opposition are close to achieving a compromise on personal voting, Verkhovna Rada remains gridlocked, and prospect of truce as far as ever.

The idle
parliamentarians who arrived en masse to their workplace on Feb. 20
wondered around corridors and chatted.

The
blockade of parliament, initiated by the opposition to demand
personal voting by all deputies, has been dragging on for 15 days, or
from the day the parliament was scheduled to convene for a session.
Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms (UDAR)
Party have been sleeping in parliament to prevent the Party of
Regions from breaking the blockade.

If
parliament fails to convene for 30 days, the president will get legal
grounds to dismiss it and call a re-election.

On
Feb. 19 leaders of most factions cautiously talked about a tentative
agreement. But instead, the two sides continued to accuse each other
of sabotaging the work of parliament.

The
opposition said the parliamentary majority rejected an earlier agreed
plan. Svoboda faction leader Oleh Tyahnybok said the agreement laid
out a new voting procedure by show of hands that is seen as the most
reliable way of voting. The opposition insists on tight control over
the voting process until a modernized electronic voting system is
launched in September.

Tyahnybok
said the Regions also backed out on earlier agreement to impose
sanctions on absentee deputies by a vote of 150 deputies, or a third
of the parliament.” Tyahnybok says the majority proposed to up the
number of deputies to 226, or simple majority, which would mean “they
will always punish us but not themselves, although they preak the law
themselves.”

Arseniy Yatseniuk,
leader of Batkivschyna faction, says the Party of Regions is trying
to buy time in a hope to make the opposition quarrel.

The Party of
Regions, however, rejects all accusations. Head of the committee on
the parliamentary regulations Volodymyr Makeyenko said he and other
members of the Regions Party faction want to see an officially
registered bill with the opposition’s proposals.

“We will discuss
them (official documents) as soon as we see them,” Makeyenko
said.

Kyiv Post staff
writer Denis Rafalsky can be reached at [email protected]