Perhaps the subject that most people want to talk about with Isabelle Dumont, France’s ambassador to Ukraine, is the one that she as the nation’s top diplomat can’t talk much about: Who’s going to win the French presidential election on April 23 and will foreign policy towards Ukraine change?
Ukrainians, and much of the Western world, dread the prospect of Marine Le Pen becoming the next president of France. Le Pen is the Kremlin-backed candidate who opposed Ukraine’s democratic revolution that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Le Pen also supports Vladimir Putin’s theft of the Crimean peninsula.
“As you can guess, I am not in a position to comment on elections which haven’t yet happened,” Dumont told the Kyiv Post in an April 6 interview at the French Embassy in Ukraine. “What I can tell you is that in history, French foreign policy has always been quite stable.”
April 23 election
But Dumont acknowledges French politics are in a new and interesting period.
“For the first time in French history, we had primaries on the left side and on the right side,” she said. “French politics have always been organized around two big parties – the right party and the left party.
Here for the first time we have a multiplication of different parties all over the horizon, which have more or less the same results in the polls for now…We will see whether it changes the French landscape.”
French politics aside, Dumont – who marks two years as ambassador this summer – finds a lot to be happy about in Ukraine.
For starters, almost the entire month of April is devoted to the French Spring festival, a popular buffet of French culture in arts, music, theater, cinema and more. The French community went all-out this year to mark the 25th year of French-Ukrainian diplomatic ties.
“The three main differences are: an emphasis on children; an emphasis on cooperation with Toulouse (France’s sister city with Kyiv since 1975) and Franco-Ukrainian cooperation,” Dumont said.
Travels Ukraine
This ambassador can be hard to find in Kyiv. She is committed to traveling to “all major cities” in Ukraine by this summer, and she’s got most of them checked off her list. She returned this week from Kherson and Mykolaiv, and recently was in Odesa where she greeted the visiting French frigate Lafayette.
“Having a French military boat coming to Ukraine is an important way to show concretely, physically, symbolically our support for Ukraine,” she said.
In Kherson, she visited French company Lactalis. In Mykolaiv, she visited French company Danone. In all cities, she tries to drop in on local officials and French-language schools. “It’s such a pleasure to see kids learning French from the age of 12,” she said.
Next stops include Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, Uzhgorod and Kamenets-Podilsky.
“It’s important for me to know the diversity of the country,” Dumont said. “Ukraine is not only Kyiv.”
Visa-free travel
The interview came the same day that the European Parliament approved visa-free travel for Ukrainians. The issue is important for Ukrainians for practical and symbolic reasons. The ability to travel to any European country (in the Schengen zone) for 90 days is a coveted privilege. Psychologically, Ukrainians regard the issue as a sign of the European Union’s embrace of the nation’s aspirations for closer Western integration.
Ukrainians look set to gain visa-free travel to Europe by June.
“As the French ambassador, I am very happy about this news,” she said. “France is in favor of visa liberalization for Ukraine…We expect the final decision to be taken in the coming weeks. It’s a positive step for Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s reforms, however, continue to be a mixed bag.
Pluses and minuses
On the encouraging side, she cites progress in the banking and energy sectors, as well as possibly an imminent breakthrough in health care reform, including a more competitive market for pharmaceuticals. She’s a supporter of many of the initiatives of acting Health Minister Ulyana Suprun, who has been attacking state health spending policies that were wasteful and untransparent, favoring insiders.
She praises outgoing National Bank of Ukraine Governor Valeria Gontareva for having the courage to shut down half of the nation’s 180 banks, most of them so-called “pocket banks” rife with insider lending and embezzlement. With Gontareva saying she will resign, Dumont said it’s important that the next team “will continue this sort of approach.”
Amid the clean-up of a sector that had been “a real burden” on Ukraine’s financial staiblity, Gontareva managed to stabilize the economy and Ukraine’s currency, the hrvynia.
She also has praise for leaders of state-owned energy giant Naftogaz for taking a company that was losing billions of hryvnia in recent years to a profitable one, mainly by applying market principles and cutting out murky intermediaries.
“This is excellent news and are a very positive message that yes it is possible to reform Ukraine. These two sectors show it’s possible,” she said. “That there were people who were able to clean up these sectors means that Ukraine has the capacity.”
Stalled court reform
On the discouraging side, Dumont said that an inconclusive battle remains between reformers and their obstructionists. This infighting is responsible for unfinished judicial reforms, including the courts.
Court reform, in particular, “hasn’t advanced much,” she said. “I would not put this for now in the positive basket. This is a point of concern. Things have been done (but) clearly we need results. You can have the best fight against corruption – if the police do the inquiries, etc., but if judges don’t deal with those cases sincerely, it just doesn’t work, it doesn’t go anywhere.”
Business climate
As for Ukraine’s business climate, the news is also mixed. A Ukraine-France business forum took place in Paris in October that Dumont called “very successful,” but thus far it’s led only to greater interest in Ukraine rather than any new investment yet.
France continues to have about 160 firms which have invested at least $1.5 billion in Ukraine. One of the flashiest is Novarka, a joint venture of two French construction firms building a new structure over the ruined reactor of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, which exploded with disastrous consequences on April 26, 1986.
She said that she still spends a lot of time in intervening with Ukrainian government officials on behalf of French companies that have been treated unfairly. She said that Ukraine’s officials still solve problems on a case-by-case or manual basis, which she called unsustainable. What’s needed, she said, is a dramatic improvement in the business climate so that companies are not facing burdensome bureaucracy and corruption.
She’s trying to manage the renewed interest from French companies towards the Ukrainain market carefully, she said, so that they don’t encounter problems. “We will need to make sure to be careful about the business climate which is still not easy,” she said.
