Yuliya is back. Ukraine held new parliamentary elections on September 30, 2007.One week before Christmas, Ukraine finally got a new government, once again headed by Yuliya Tymoshenko, the ‘Orange Princess’ or the ‘Ukrainian Joan of Arc’ - the woman with half a dozen brand names, one of which is being known by her first name alone. The Orange Revolution, however, which has received so many obituaries since 2004 (especially since Tymoshenko’s first premiership collapsed in September 2005) is not so much back on track as on a different set of tracks – still going forward, but in some unexpected directions.

Some of its underlying achievements seem more secure. When President Viktor Yushchenko ordered the dissolution of parliament in April 2007, his minimum aim was to “reboot” the political system and loosen the tightening grip on “administrative resources” that the government of his one-time nemesis Viktor Yanukovych had achieved since returning to office in July 2006. This has been achieved. Yanukovych is now in opposition. In sharp contrast to the recent trend in Russia, the Ukrainian elections were once again mostly free and fair, with all parties tested by a relatively free media. The small Socialist Party, which switched sides to put Yanukovych in office in 2006, suffered a chastening electoral obliteration, as a result of clearer chains of accountability between politicians and voters. Other parties will hopefully think twice before ignoring their voters in the future.

Public opinion has not shifted as much as one might expect, given all the disappointments since 2004. Electorally, the 2007 contest was not so different to those in 2006 or 2004. Beneath the surface, however, all three main parties are groping towards different types of post-Orange politics. All eyes are on the next presidential election due in 2009 or 2010.

Election Surprises

One reason to be skeptical about Tymoshenko’s short-term prospects, apart from the obvious narrowness of her parliamentary majority, is that her return was not the expected plan. In May 2007 one set of businessmen, grouped around Yushchenko’s Presidential Administration, reached a compromise on early elections while another set grouped around Rinat Akhmetov, the main financier of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, based on an assumed eventual “grand coalition” involving both. Although Yushchenko himself precipitated the early vote, the more foresighted of his advisors worried that Tymoshenko might outflank them in another election campaign , given that she has always been a much better public performer than president.

Results of the 2007 Ukrainian Elections

And so these predictions proved correct, but on a much bigger scale than expected. Tymoshenko roared ahead in the campaign from 22.3 percent in the March 2006 elections to 30.7 percent in September 2007, winning not just redistributed “Orange” votes (two Orange parties not running this time won 3.4 percent in 2006), but new votes as well.

A second surprise was that the president’s own party had to reconnect with all things Orange and sideline its business wing, merely to tread water in the polls. But this conflicted with the open hostility to Tymoshenko in the upper reaches of the presidential administration. By election day, Yushchenko was forced to play an obvious double game: one half of his entourage was working hard to prevent a renewed Orange alliance, just as the other half was working hard to build it up. A third surprise was overall voter loyalty despite so many substantial reasons for disillusion with all sides. The “Orange” half of the electorate showed extraordinary patience in reiterating its vote for arguably the fourth time (counting the 2002 election as well as the dramatic 2004 election, the “second chance” vote of 2006, and the “third chance” vote of 2007). The “Blue and White” vote for the Party of Regions also proved remarkably solid, backing up the argument often made that there were “two revolutions” in 2004: an Orange Revolution in west and central Ukraine and a parallel maturation of political consciousness in the south and east.

Because the vote was close, other possibilities were only narrowly excluded. The exact results are important. Having dissolved one five-year parliament after only a year, Ukraine is presumably now stuck with this one for the foreseeable future.

The Party of Regions probably shot itself in the foot by swallowing most of the smaller parties on its side of the fence. Although it improved the first place it first won in 2006, its vote only went up from 32.2 percent to 34.4 percent, and it ended up with fewer allies to form a potential coalition on its own. One satellite party, the Communists, made it into parliament, but only because another, the Socialists, were now out. The former chair of parliament, Volodymyr Lytvyn, planned to sell himself to both sides, but the math didn’t add up. The Party of Regions plus the Communists made only 202 seats, even a troika with the supposedly “neutral” Lytvyn Bloc still made only 222 seats out of 450. The Party of Regions had hoped to preserve the option of governing alone, or in coalition with these smaller parties. Now it could not.

That said, there are still two underlying options, and neither is stable in either the short or medium term.

A renewed Orange coalition makes more sense at an electoral than at an elite level. Its survival prospects in the new parliament are not good. The coalition of the Tymoshenko Bloc plus Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defence theoretically has 228 votes out of 450. However, in the actual voting for Prime Minister, it won only 225 votes in the unsuccessful first attempt, and then a bare majority of only 226 a week later. It is a tribute to nascent party discipline that these numbers held together at all, but in Ukrainian circumstances a majority of one is never going to last. The new government will control the executive, but is unlikely to win many votes in parliament. There is already talk of it falling at the first major political crisis, while both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko concentrate most of their energies on a blame game – who will be seen to have done most to keep the Orange project together – and narrow issues of who sits where at government meetings.