President Viktor Yushchenko is prepared to suspend his edict dissolving the Verkhovna Rada of the fifth convocation. He has agreed to do this in return for a package of political compromises, particularly the legislative enactment of an imperative mandate for parliamentarians.
In the compromise package the president also named a new law on the Cabinet of Ministers, a law on the order of business of the Verkhovna Rada, a law on the opposition, the legislative enactment of the Declaration of National Unity, and amendments to the election law. President Yushchenko added that it is also necessary to nullify the cabinet’s illegitimate decisions that were passed after he signed the edict dissolving Ukraine’s parliament, to continue updating the constitution, and set up an appropriate task force.
President Yushchenko still believes that early elections are the most effective way to settle the crisis. “Early parliamentary elections are a key and inalienable aspect of resolving the parliamentary crisis. These are conclusions that allow all parties to the conflict to realize the inadmissibility of breaching the constitution the way it was done,” he noted.
The president’s move is entirely logical. In the first place, it is absolutely clear that holding an election on May 27 is impossible for purely technical reasons. Second, after the BYuT and Our Ukraine “zeroized” their slates, the crisis changed from a general political one to an internal, parliamentary one. The president’s edict, which leaves much to be desired from the legal standpoint, is not that necessary anymore.
Political scientist Kost Bondarenko believes that “the president wants to pull out. The president should have insisted at the outset that the BYuT and Our Ukraine follow this road, in other words, hand down their mandates. Then the president would not be involved. But he made a mistake at the very beginning and is trying to correct it belatedly.”
Now the biggest unknown is how these bills will be tabled. Will the coalition vote for them in a half-empty parliament, without the opposition? We know that the opposition has no intentions of returning.
Bondarenko is optimistic. He believes that the majority of parliamentarians will vote for the bills demanded by the president. “I think that both sides have learned from the situation that took shape three weeks ago. I believe that both sides will agree to mutual compromises and will look for a way out of the crisis,” he predicts.
