Government crisis continues in Ukraine

The Party of the Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovich, won a plurality in March’s elections, taking 186 out of 450 parliamentary seats. But it was shut out of power by a coalition of the three parties that had played the leading role in the 2004 so-called “Orange revolution”—President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc and the Socialist Party.

The pro-Western parties had been haggling for months over the terms of their coalition. On June 21, Tymoshenko, who was sacked as prime minister last year after a split with Yushchenko, announced that her bloc would share power with the president’s Our Ukraine and the Socialist Party. The coalition had begun distributing key cabinet and parliamentary posts between themselves and had agreed for Tymoshenko to be made prime minister and for Yushchenko aide Petro Poroshenko to become speaker.

In protest, the Party of the Regions began blocking parliament. Yanukovich was Yushchenko’s opponent in the disputed presidential poll in 2004, and the Party of the Regions draws most of its support from the largely Russian-speaking industrial south and east of the country where the “Orange” vote was negligible.

The prospect of a prolonged period without a permanent government would have forced the president to use his powers to call fresh elections. Such is the unpopularity of the Yushchenko regime that it is likely that Our Ukraine would fare even worse than the dismal third place it received in March, when it polled just 13 percent of the vote.

According to reports, there has been some progress in talks between the leaders of the parliamentary factions, including the Communist Party, but still no agreement has been reached.

Unprincipled deals and political instability

Whatever administration is finally cobbled together, it will be politically unstable and lack any genuine democratic mandate.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/ukra-j06.shtml