Barely a year after Ukraine's "Orange Revolution," it's terribly sad for anyone who rejoiced with the thousands of Ukrainians camped in Kiev's wintry Independence Square, and with victorious president-elect Viktor Yushchenko, his face ravaged by his opponents' dioxin-poisoning attempt, to watch it all fall apart. But we can't play Candide and tune in only the feel-good upside of these stories.
Yesterday, Ukraine's Parliament voted to dismiss Yushchenko's government. Yushchenko went to court to appeal what he called the "illegal and unconstitutional" move; Prime Minister Yuri Yekhanurov called it "utter lawlessness."
The immediate rock on which the ship of state split: energy. The triggering event: a steep increase in the price of natural gas, negotiated by the government with supplier Russia in a compromise to avert an even larger increase:
The 250-50 vote in the 450-seat parliament followed controversy over government negotiators' signing of an agreement last week to nearly double the price Ukraine pays Russia for natural gas and hand over control of gas sales to a little-known company half owned by the Russian gas giant Gazprom.Parliament deputies also voted to freeze electricity and natural gas prices to consumers through 2006.
The contract was a compromise with Russia, which had vowed to end long-standing below-market sales to Ukraine and charge prices equal to those Europe pays -- which would have quadrupled gas rates.
But even with the smaller increase, "the Ukrainian economy may fall into paralysis, and the country may lose markets," leaders of some of the country's top industries warned Tuesday.
But rifts in the Orange family run far deeper. Last September President Yushchenko fired the madly popular, mildly megalomaniacal Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom he had been forced to take on by her "cultlike following among the protesters." From Andrey Slivka's profile in the New York Times Magazine:
By late summer [ . . .] the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko alliance had become a disaster, with the two leaders' camps at war and with Tymoshenko's followers accusing the Yushchenko administration of corruption. Few of the Orange Revolution's reformist goals had been met. It had also become clear that the two pillars of the revolution had visions for Ukraine that were as different as their personalities. Yushchenko is a soft-spoken and conciliatory former banker, and his presidency has been characterized by an almost painfully deliberate approach to ending official Ukraine's robust criminal culture. In contrast, Tymoshenko is a passionate radical by nature, who made settling accounts with Ukraine's crooked "oligarch" class a central theme of her tenure in office. Tymoshenko, who is 45 but looks and acts younger, is also a brash custodian of her own celebrity. [ . . . ]In the West, Yushchenko is considered a responsible leader who appropriately has done with revolutionary passions. But in Ukraine many are not convinced that the revolution was waged just to make Ukraine a safe place to invest. These Ukrainians yearn for the crusade against corruption and the elite bandits that the revolution promised them.
Tymoshenko embodies that crusade.
Ironically so, since she is a former energy oligarch herself.
Parliamentary elections are scheduled for March 26, and Yushchenko claims that the new constitution, which gives Parliament the power to appoint the government, will only take full effect with the new Parliament. The current Parliament's no-confidence vote is thought to be mainly a tactic of pre-election maneuvering. But the next Parliament may reappoint Tymoshenko as prime minister -- a move feared in the investor West because of her tendencies toward populist statism, price controls and expropriation -- and she could run for president in 2009. Meanwhile, the leading candidate for prime minister in the March elections is . . . Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko's Russian-backed 2004 rival and the intended beneficiary of his poisoning. But to make matters even more complicated, the two former enemies have already signed a political pact -- another compromise that doesn't make Yushchenko popular with the idealistic young.
Behind the scenes pulling strings, I'm guessing, is Russia, which had ferociously opposed Yushchenko's turn to the West. You have to wonder if the move to raise natural-gas prices was predominantly economic, or a well-timed political monkey wrench. The Ukrainian blog ORANGE REVOLUTION, with links to a seething Ukrainian blogosphere, seems to assume as much in a post headlined "Our Ukraine: Political Puppets do Russia's Bidding." The best map I've seen of Ukraine's fractured and complicated political landscape, as it struggles to escape the paralyzing gravitation of its Soviet past, is this post at ORANGE REVOLUTION.
It's so easy for outside saboteurs to drive a well-placed wedge into a fragile new democracy's internal divisions. Let that be a lesson for the very different, and even more riven, Iraq.
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