Are we about to witness a summer of simmering discontent that could boil over into full-scale revolution? According to experts, Ukraine is closer to Arab-style regime change protests than many Western policymakers think.
Rumblings of discontent seem to be everywhere.
According to a March survey by the Kyiv-based Gorshenin Institute, 45 percent of Ukrainians stated their readiness to take part in protests. Such sentiment is not lost on online forums and blogs calling for a popular “Day of Wrath” on May 14. In Kyiv, a labor union plans to hold a rally on May 19 to protest against the tax code and unpopular pension reforms.
Of course, Ukraine is not the only country where opposition forces seek to capitalize on the Arab spring protests that have already forced regime change in Tunisia and Egypt. In Georgia, opposition groups have called for mass rallies from May 21 in the capital of Tbilisi and other cities. However, such calls for protest are unlikely to be heeded. The government of reform-minded President Mikheil Saakashvili is more popular than the regime of Yanukovych. Yet there are other reasons worthy of note.
Georgia has a legitimate constitutional order that is respected by government and people alike. In Ukraine, the constitution has been bent and breached with impunity by the regime on numerous occasions – perhaps most notably by the 25-year extension of the lease of the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, which rode roughshod over the constitution which forbids foreign bases on Ukrainian territory.
In Georgia, law enforcement agencies are non-corrupt and professionally effective – a product of the government’s huge anti-corruption program and reform policies. In Ukraine, the police are endemically corrupt; the state security force – some 40,000 strong – is an agent of repression; and the judiciary, which is controlled politically, is neither fair nor independent. In Georgia, young people are the beneficiaries of the country’s modernization and the country has a clear and almost universally popular Euro-Atlantic integration policy.
In Ukraine, the young and middle class feel disconnected from the political elite. Moreover, according to the World Bank, some 35.5 million people or 78 percent of the population live in relative poverty with 12.5 million living on less than $3 per day.
In Ukraine there is no clear foreign policy. One minute it is pro-European, the next pro-Russian. In reality foreign policy is determined by what best suits the oligarchy. At the moment, the status quo best suits them.
Add to this heady mix a 50 percent rise in household heating bills, inflationary pressure, rises in the pension age, rampant corruption, repression of civil liberties (such as freedom of the press and the right to assembly) and it’s not hard to see why experts think that Ukraine is a powder keg waiting for a spark.
Oleh Medvedev is a political adviser to Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s former prime minister and now an opposition leader.
