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THE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION RETURNS IN UKRAINE

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STANISLAV BELKOVSKY,
Founder of the National Strategy Institutes in Russia and Ukraine, Moscow

Summing up the Ukrainian election returns, one can say that the elections’ main result is Yuliya Tymoshenko’s triumph.   

Yuliya Tymoshenko succeeded in conducting two campaigns: the first campaign – in the west of Ukraine, the second one – in the east and south where she positioned herself as a Russian-speaking opponent of Ukraine’s joining NATO. Yuliya Tymoshenko’s success has shown that the society is tired of the politics and the existing elites.  

Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc’s success and, as a matter of fact, the Party of Regions’ defeat have made Ukraine’s elites choose if to yield power to Yuliya Tymoshenko or not. Yuliya Tymoshenko’s premiership would change Ukraine's political system and the foundations of the Ukrainian government’s legitimacy drastically.  

For the latest 16 years Ukraine's legitimacy has been institutional. The government rested upon the political institutions formed during the elections. Yuliya Tymoshenko’s advent to power would mean that the institutional legitimacy will give way to charismatic one. Her regime would be authoritarian.   

Those believing that many problems and mistakes will break Yuliya Tymoshenko’s cabinet are naïve. Yuliya Tymoshenko herself will decide for how long she will remain in power and when she should resign. She will begin her premiership with reforms that would be popular all over Ukraine. This is the enterprise reprivatization that will be implemented in legal form rather than through the government decisions. This is campaign against the oligarchs and measures to return the deposits that lost value in Sberbank.  

It means that for Ukraine charisma and left-right populism of Yuliya Tymoshenko become the uniting factors. This indicates the crisis, or maybe, the forthcoming breakup of the existing Ukrainian establishment that failed to give any arguments for Ukraine’s mental unification. Yuliya Tymoshenko outmatched the elite.  

So, the elites’ giving power up to Yuliya Tymoshenko would mean that the elite, including Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, must be sidelined for good.

Under Yuliya Tymoshenko, a kind of the Francoist regime could be formed in Ukraine. It could have positive and negative sides. The positive sides will include translating the people’s hopes of social justice into reality, attacks on oligarchs and appearance of a charismatic leader in the country. The negative sides will include the abolition of freedom of speech and true competition.  

This way, Ukraine has to make a choice that will be a watershed in its political history.  

After the Kremlin suffered a defeat in Ukraine in 2004, Russia gave up the idea of exerting consistent political influence on that country. Moscow backed no political forces in the 2006 as well as 2007 elections. The Russian-Ukrainian relations consist only in the energy supply. When Yuliya Tymoshenko becomes Prime Minister, RosUkrEnergo will disappear. But the gas prices will not go down. The Russian-Ukrainian relations will not change fundamentally because there is no political subject of those relations and the energy trade scheme.  

October 5, 2007




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