For the beginning of the new political season Arsenii Yatseniuk has a big surprise up his sleeve: a new, modernized system called Rada-3, which will help implement, in practice, not just in theory, the constitutional principle of “one MP, one vote.” The system will go into operation only in two or three weeks because the developers have not had time to certify it.
During a vote an MP will now have to keep his or her finger on the sensor button all the time, otherwise the system will not accept the input. Putting some chewing gum or other substance on the button will not work. Yatseniuk assured journalists that the buttons will acknowledge only the flesh of the “button-pushers.”
However, one long-fingered journalist still managed to vote “for the other guy.” This circumstance did not greatly perturb the parliamentary speaker, who said jokingly that sometimes it is useful to submit a positive vote. He then added that he would have the buttons moved even “farther away.”
It is difficult to predict how the new voting system will operate. But it is already clear that Yatseniuk will not get any thanks from Ukraine’s MPs. With the system in place, parliament may stall completely.
You may remember that we saw the coalition in its full complement only once-during the voting to confirm Tymoshenko as prime minister. That spectacle was not for the faint-hearted: Vladyslav Kaskiv hobbled in on crutches and Stanislav Dovhy arrived in an ambulance. But everything ended well. Tymoshenko was confirmed, and we have not seen a full coalition since then. It turned out to be a single-use weapon.
The Party of Regions also has very respectable MPs who have been seen in the session hall only a few times. After all, pushing buttons is not for the likes of millionaires. The party has people specially trained for this purpose, and they have been known to press between 8 and 10 buttons during one and the same vote. The following scene could often be observed: 10 to 15 MPs are sitting in the hall while the words “decision adopted” are flashed on the screen.
Out of the blue, Yatseniuk decided to change everything, guided, of course, by good intentions and constitutional regulations. However, experts believe that this may backfire to his detriment as well as parliamentarianism as such.
“This is a straight-A student making fools of hooligan D students,” said political scientist Viktor Nebozhenko in an interview with The Day. “MPs are not in charge of their schedules; they depend on their financial schemes and will never be able to organize work [in parliament] because they have come not to engage in politics, as is the case in the West, but to do business. In this situation there will always be a problem of whether a particular vote will pass or not.
“Moreover, analysts of all party headquarters will advise the leading factions to obstruct a vote if they don’t have enough people. And here’s what Yatseniuk has done: he has complicated parliament’s operations and created great indistinctness. For one thing, votes may be very vivid but accidental. Second, it will cause the disappearance of the famous Ukrainian know-how, when MPs vote for the prime minister by a show of hands.
“The system that has been developed and implemented by Yatseniuk implies that MPs don’t trust each other. The public, too, does not believe that a vote has been cast by a certain MP and not someone else. This has diminished the prestige of parliamentarians’ work.”
