To paraphrase a popular advertisement, you have dreams, while they have means to achieve them. Time is clocking away. Everything was done quickly and neatly. It took just three hours to form a coalition and to appoint a new Cabinet of Ministers and the new Security Service (SBU) chief Valerii Khoroshkovsky.
Mykola Azarov diligently read his speech in Ukrainian. The principal message is that this country has touched the critical line, after which there is a huge abyss and it will be extremely difficult to climb out of it. A second wave of the crisis is in the offing, and we must get ourselves ready for it. It is very good that a team of true professionals who know what to do has come to power. He assured the MPs that he would submit the 2010 state budget for the Verkhovna Rada’s consideration as early as April 11 and promised that he would explain to the people that it is inevitable to take stern measures.
Azarov’s nomination for premier was supported by 242 MPs. The latter ran almost bounding to Viktor Yanukovych who kissed him and gave him a bouquet of roses to the audience’s thunderous applause. Somebody even cried out “Bravo!” Indeed, this was the moment of triumph for the Party of Regions and the president personally, for he finally managed to force through a candidacy of his choice. Whether or not it was legitimate is another question…
Then things went swimmingly. The next item on the agenda was dismissing Valentyn Nalyvaichenko as SBU head (230 votes) and appointing Valerii Khoroshkovsky to this office (238 votes).
But the main intrigue was the appointment of ministers. To begin with, the MPs were given printed information on Anatolii Kuzmuk and Petro Poroshenko as prospective ministers of defense and foreign affairs, respectively, well before the session. But, as a result, other people were assigned these offices. In other words, candidatures were changed in a matter of half an hour. “This is popularly known as ‘ditching.’ It is a tradition in the Party of Regions. They can ditch anybody, including their own people,” BYuT MP Ostap Semerak said jokingly to The Day.
The names of many of the new ministers call up some odious associations. But what gave observers perhaps the greatest shock was the appointment of the “historian” Dmytro Tabachnyk as minister of education and science. Once chief of President Kuchma’s staff, he has repeatedly called for protecting canonical Orthodoxy, forming an antifascist movement in Ukraine, and introducing dual citizenship. On the other hand, Tabachnyk has received a chance to right himself in the new office and shed the image of a Ukrainophobe. Incidentally, it will be very interesting to see how Tabachnyk will be working in the same cabinet with Kolesnikov who once dubbed him a “cheap clown.”
Another interesting appointment is Vasyl Tsushko as minister of economics. Incidentally, as recently as last Wednesday the Prosecutor General’s Office dropped the criminal case it had opened against Tsushko for his role in the seizure of this office premises in 2007.
“There are two aspects here. The first one is human. It is absolutely clear that the Party of Regions and Yanukovych have a moral duty to Tsushko,” Inna Bohoslovska told The Day. “Will he manage to deliver the goods as minister of economics? This is an open question, because I do not know what he has been doing in the past two years, which was a rigorous test for him.”
What also stuns one is the number – seven – of vice premiers in the new government. What are they going to do there? One of the vice premiers, Volodymyr Semynozhenko, assured The Day’s correspondent that “there is so much work to do that will keep busy even this number of vice premiers.” But still this number of vice premiers runs counter to Serhii Liovochkin’s promise to cut the cabinet staff by 20 percent. This rather looks like a 30-percent increase.
What conclusions can be made after the new government has been formed?
Firstly, the so-called Firtash group is now holding sway in the Party of Regions. Only two people of Rinat Akhmetov – Vice Premier Kolesnikov and Minister for Youth and Sports Ravvil Safiullin – are now in the cabinet. On the other hand, nobody can now accuse Yanukovych of being a “puppet” in Akhmetov’s hands.
Secondly, the president/premier face-off is over. Both of them are like-minded people. This means there will be no dualism in topmost-echelon decision-making. Besides, the president and the Cabinet are going to make a joint effort in the next few days to form a streamlined vertical pattern of power. In other words, regional governors are to be appointed.
And, finally, the danger of an early parliamentary election has so far vanished. Ukraine is going to live without political upheavals at least for some time.
And will the new government do a good job? We shall wait and see.
