A Grand Coalition

The Presidential Administration has once again kept alive the option of a grand coalition by appointing Raisa Bohatyrova, number two or three in the Party of Regions, to head the National Security and Defence Council as a counterweight to the Tymoshenko government. On the other hand, a formal alliance between Our Ukraine and the Party of Regions has been made more difficult by the new rules of the “imperative mandate”. In 2006 Ukraine introduced a constitutional requirement that deputies cannot change parties – they must serve the party they were elected to represent under the national list system of proportional representation. The president’s old party, Our Ukraine, had been in the doldrums in 2005 and 2006, and only rescued its declining fortunes by entering into an awkward alliance with the new People’s Self-Defence party, led by the popular former Interior Minister Yurii Lutsenko. Lutsenko prefers to work with Tymoshenko, but is opposed by the Our Ukraine businessmen who were only pushed into the wings rather than forced offstage for the elections. The two now make a pantomime horse, which cannot change direction without splitting in two. A dozen or more Our Ukraine deputies are opposed to a renewed alliance with Tymoshenko, which is enough to make the new government’s life a misery, , yet the new rules prevent them from defecting as a bloc. A coalition with the Party of Regions would also be presumed electoral suicide for Our Ukraine, whose support base retreated further into the western regions in 2007. Significantly, Yushchenko now talks in much vaguer terms of a shirka , some type of “wider” arrangement that remains undefined.

In their different ways, however, both strategies aim to overcome the Orange (west and central Ukraine) versus Blue and White (eastern and southern Ukraine) divisions that were so apparent in 2004. The potential “grand coalition” is not as grand as it might be. There is a case to be made for a historical compromise between the Ukrainian east and west, but so far the proposed coalition is on the basis of business interests rather than the reconciliation of Ukraine’s different regions and identities. Ukraine’s business culture has changed much since 2004, towards the relative openness and accountability necessary for foreign direct investment (FDI), international financial institutions (IFIs), and initial public offerings (IPOs), though much remains to be done about corporate raiding, insider privatization, and the rule of law. A more business-friendly Ukraine would increasingly be a very different country from Russia, but not in the way that many people expected in 2004. Ukraine’s big businessmen (rarely women, “oligarchs” is still the preferred Ukrainian term) who back all three main parties, Tymoshenko’s included, are still widely detested both for their self-enrichment in the 1990s and their continuing sharp practices in the present day. Ukrainian GDP continues to boom, but the abstract public good of a better business climate is a difficult sell to an electorate which believed in the 2004 slogan of “bandits to prison” – even as the country gears up for the necessary investment to cohost the finals of the European Soccer Championship in 2012.

Tymoshenko the “Populist”

Tymoshenko, on the other hand, has played a different double game. Since 2004 she has pulled off the difficult trick of presenting herself as the keeper of the conscience of the original Orange Revolution, while simultaneously moving towards a type of post-Orange populism. “Populism” is normally held to be a bad thing, but Ivan Krastev, in “Two Cheers for Populism” for Prospect Magazine (January 2008), has mounted a spirited defense of its increasing prevalence in post-Communist Europe. Tymoshenko therefore has many analogues. She may be guilty of many of populism’s characteristic sins, such as promoting “emotional rather than programmatic satisfaction from politics” and raising “expectations that cannot be fulfilled,” as with her campaign promise to compensate Ukrainians for the loss of their Soviet era savings in the great inflation of the early 1990s.On the other hand, Tymoshenko has challenged the elite, in the name of the people, after the elite closed off the revolutionary energies of 2004 with indecent haste, and attacked accepted “givens” like the role of the shady energy intermediary Rosukrenergo. Her constant harping on privatization may be a threat to business confidence and domestic investment, but her constant anti-corruption rhetoric is a useful reminder of the broken promises of 2004. And in the Ukrainian context, it is her personality politics which has proven the best antidote to Ukraine’s otherwise entrenched regional divides. Tymoshenko no longer campaigns in orange. As early as 2006 her campaign colors were red and white – white for her, red for a heart symbolizing her role in the struggle for “justice” (“Justice is possible” is her campaign slogan).

Justice may be possible in the short-term, though even the key savings promise has had to be finessed. The budget could not afford the cost; the Ukrainian economy could not absorb the all-too predictable inflation). But as soon as Tymoshenko shifts towards any more direct attack on the “oligarchs,” there will be trouble in the coalition.

Regions’ Rethink

An as yet relatively unexplored “third way” to a post-Orange Ukraine might one day be taken by the Party of Regions. To date, it has played safe, sticking to anti-Orange identity politics, over-confident that its “half” of Ukraine is the natural majority. The 2007 campaign showed the first hints of a rethink. The party hired US political consultants, who advocated a pragmatic pitch based on practical achievements in government. Now that it is in opposition, however, the party is over-due a debate on what happened when that advice was ignored in the last two weeks of the campaign. Did the reversion to issues like the Russian language and NATO membership help to shore up the party’s core vote in south-east Ukraine? Or did it stem an advance towards more moderate voters? The Party of Regions was, after all, only short of victory by a few seats. There is every sign that Akhmetov’s and Bohatyrova’s wing of the party is beginning to think about the next phase in the party’s existence, with some radicals even prepared to contemplate a total relaunch: new faces, a new, possibly satellite, party, and a new candidate for president.