Almost six months have past since Verkhovna Rada approved the Yanukovych Cabinet’s action program. This brings us to the middle of the period during which the parliament promised to resist the temptation of voting it down.
On April 17 this year the government action plan was backed by 335 deputies, which means the parliamentary majority plus part of the Socialist Party, the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc and half of Our Ukraine. It is very Ukrainian to be in the opposition and vote for the premier, cabinet’s program, budget, etc. Yet, it will be recalled that the triumph was marred by parliamentary oppositionists, who accused the premier and the majority of breaking political agreements allegedly reached shortly before. According to Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz, Viktor Yanukovych promised to help the bill On Proportional Representation, unsuccessfully pushed for a long time by the parliamentary opposition, in exchange for support of the government program. However, this document, put to a vote immediately after the government program, gathered only 217 votes. Naturally, the majority (particularly the Regions of Ukraine faction) denied having made any deals with the opposition. Still, the latter managed to put its fly in the government’s ointment.
It is also worth recalling that just a few days later on April 19 the Party of the Regions (PR) congress elected Yanukovych as its leader and Mykola Azarov, First Vice-Premier and Minister of Finance, as chairman of the PR political council. Having studied the renewed and enlarged PR leadership, observers even hastened to announce the birth of another party of power in Ukraine. Incidentally, the Party of the Regions declared in no uncertain terms at its congress the intention to win the 2006 parliamentary elections.
Clearly, the merry-go-round of Verkhovna Rada approval of the cabinet program was only the beginning of the trial time for the so-called coalition cabinet of Yanukovych. The next exam — the situation that emerged in the early summer on the Ukrainian food market — exposed, so to speak, the government’s inner contradictions (perhaps sown at the time when the current Cabinet was being formed). The Day reported that the Cabinet suggested different ways of managing the alleged grain crisis in particular and addressing the agrarian sector’s problems in general. Yet, at that stage, those engaged in the internal governmental debate tried to refrain from making their differences public. It should be noted for fairness’ sake that the so-called grain crisis could have had far worse consequences for the Yanukovych cabinet. Heads could have rolled because, as we remember, it is not only the opposition that cried for the blood of the ministers in charge of agriculture. Yet, there were no victims. The president advised the premier “not to shoot from the hip” while exposing the causes and the culprits...
The crack widened as the Cabinet of Ministers formulated its attitude toward the formation of a single economic space (SES) by the CIS Four — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. It was an unprecedented case that several cabinet members (among them Minister of the Economy and European Integration Valery Khoroshkovsky, Foreign Minister Kostiantyn Hryshchenko, and Minister of Justice Oleksandr Lavrynovych) should have made public their minority opinion on this matter. Factions of the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and Labor Ukraine (extremely interested in strengthening business ties between some of their members and their Russian partners) even threatened to recall from the government their party-affiliated ministers who dared cast doubt on the advantages of signing the SES treaty. For while the government as a whole might be immune, each of its members is by no means protected from the vagaries of fate. (Incidentally, Agrarian Party leader Mykhailo Hladiy also made it clear in a Day interview that his party keeps its representatives in the cabinet, Vice-Premier Ivan Kyrylenko and Agrarian Policies Minister Serhiy Ryzhuk, under watch, While the conflict seems to have been defused, Mr. Yanukovych cautioned his colleagues against doing such things again and called on them “to follow the same line” during the budget-2004 debate.
One way or another, Mr. Yanukovych has failed to make a true coalition out of his government in the past six months. The cause is the thirst for power in the coming elections, about which each of the parties represented in the government has plans of its own. This substantially reduces the cabinet’s effectiveness.
