Diplomats seldom resort to issuing harsh statements about other countries’ domestic situation. There are exceptions to this rule. A few weeks ago US State Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that Our Ukraine’s poor results in the parliamentary elections stemmed from the fact that the ruling party failed to justify Ukrainian society’s expectations brought about by the Orange Revolution.
“The expectations that they could have fulfilled were at odds with what they could actually accomplish,” Rice said. What did this leading American government figure mean? What are the mistakes made by the Orange government? The Day asked several experts to comment on this.
Piotr KOSCINSKI, Rzeczpospolita, Poland:
The biggest mistake made by the Orange government is that they failed to meet the people’s expectations; they accomplished very little. There were many promises and few, if any, were fulfilled. The government had to explain why. Scandals involving the president’s son Andriy and members of the president’s entourage (e.g., accusations of corruption) dealt a heavy blow to this government, and the rift in the Orange camp has had a certain negative effect.
What should the new coalition be like? For many Poles its color is important, of course. Here a sentimental factor is at play; the Poles supported the Orange government. But that’s not the important point. It’s important for the new government to support reformist approaches to securing Ukraine’s admission to the European Union.
I haven’t heard of any such effort made by the Party of the Regions. Therefore, the most practical option appears to be an Orange coalition. However, I think that Poland and the European Union are prepared to cooperate with any Ukrainian government, regardless of its color.
The new government will certainly take into account past mistakes and try to avoid repeating them. Ukraine must adopt a European political model that is more predictable. In Poland, unfortunately, politics often do not correspond to the European model.
There are, however, basic principles with which we have to comply. For example, an outside observer would consider it important to know more about the kind of relations that exist among government members; whether they are operating on the basis of mutual confidence. It is also important to clarify what the Presidential Secretariat or the National Defense Council will be doing so that once again it doesn’t turn out that the functions of different agencies are interlaced.
This has a negative effect on their performance, and confusion is often observed. The new government must become a venue of clear-cut, coordinated work, rather than another bridgehead for a power play. To put it simply, the Ukrainian government must become a normal European one. Of course, even advanced European democracies have their problems, but we have to follow good examples, don’t we?
Yevgeniy MINCHENKO, director general of the Russian analytical agency New Image:
The answer to this question should be divided in two parts. The first one has to do with the mistakes made Ms. Rice; the second one has to do with mistakes that were actually made.
Obviously, the Americans consider the rift in the Orange team, namely the ousting of Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister, to be the main mistake. The US has tried to reconcile the former prime minister and the president. This didn’t work out. It is possible to assume that Washington took a dim view of the Ukrainian government’s overly soft attitude to the representatives of Leonid Kuchma’s “political heirs.”
Realistically speaking, both Tymoshenko and Yushchenko squandered the credit of popular confidence that they received one year ago. Neither President Yushchenko nor Prime Minister Tymoshenko showed any degree of professional performance. Tymoshenko’s hands-on handling of Ukraine’s economy led to a number of problems, the main one being the glaring lack of professionalism on the part of the team that came to power.
This was most dramatically demonstrated by the solutions to energy supply problems. Dizzy with political success, believing that their support from the masses would never end, they made their biggest mistakes. It should be noted that even now not a single political force that has entered the Verkhovna Rada has a clearly formulated strategy for Ukraine’s development. This is troubling.
