One more week has gone by, with the members of the future democratic coalition doing their traditional exercises in the Verkhovna Rada, aimed at creating a majority-accusing each other of sabotage and drawing up differing versions of the agreement.
According to Yosyp Vinsky, first secretary of the Socialist Party’s (SPU) Political Council, “the SPU and the BYuT (Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc) are working intensively to reach an understanding on the basics of domestic and foreign policy.” He noted that “we will thus be able to offer our partners a coordinated document as a joint position. We think that the clearer the SPU and BYuT position is, the simpler it will be for the NU (Our Ukraine) to conduct a debate and make decisions, because in the last while there have been differences between the NU and its partners.”
Our Ukraine is also effortlessly drafting an agreement. The NU’s Mykola Katerynchuk said recently: “In drawing up its own version of a coalition agreement, Our Ukraine is trying to take into account the viewpoints of the BYuT and the SPU.” He pointed out that for a while they had suspended work on the agreement’s economic clauses because of certain differences with the Socialist Party. The Socialists insist on extending the moratorium on free land trade until 2009, while the NU says that free land trade must be permitted as soon as possible.
It is not yet clear which of the “coordinated” draft agreements the coalition negotiators will submit to the president. Viktor Yushchenko promised to meet the negotiators next week, provided he is given a “single” version of the agreement. The president has suggested that the negotiators include all unresolved points in a separate document outside the coalition agreement.
Perhaps what inspired the president to make this proposal was the Party of Regions (PR) which suddenly offered, without any fanfare, its own version of a coalition agreement that, incidentally, takes the sensitive problems of NATO and the Russian language outside the brackets. Almost all political experts are unanimous in saying that the very fact of a coalition agreement offer from the PR adds further weight to this political force.
“The Party of Regions is winning points with the public because it works without any hysteria but with dignity, as befits a respectable political force,” political scientist Oles Doniy told The Day. “They are showing a readiness to unite; they have concrete and well-considered proposals. Evidently, if there are long- term problems with the Orange coalition or if the latter breaks up in a year, this document will be one of the foundations for the Party of Region to negotiate with some other political force.”
Political scientist Viktor Nebozhenko, chief of the Ukrainian Barometer polling service, has also been tracking the progress of the “regionals.” “It is very important that the Party of Regions is trying to speak, albeit simplistically and superficially, about European democracy and a liberal economy. This was unthinkable even a few years ago,” he told Glavred (www.glavred.info) .
The expert believes that “the PR’s behavior is a bit undignified for a high-profile political player. They are the winners, who won 32 percent in the elections. At the same time, they are behaving like a third-rate party waiting for the two strong parties to quarrel and offer it a place in big politics. A winner should not play the role of a ‘golden share.’ This is the lot of weak parties that have no strength. Machiavelli is good for those who can work in the mode of political intrigue, not big-time politics. The very fact that the PR has at last managed to make its proposals known even indirectly shows that they have at last woken up. ‘The regions’ have begun to engage in politics. But they themselves may be unaware of this.”
