The orange revolutionaries let the side down

Sep 8th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko has sacked his prime minister and her cabinet following the resignation of several senior figures amid allegations of corruption. Last year’s orange revolution promised much but has so far delivered little

WINNING power is the easy bit. Wielding it properly is much harder. That is the lesson for the victors of Ukraine’s orange revolution. Squabbling and scandals among the country’s new rulers have shrivelled the high hopes of the demonstrators who braved the freezing streets of Kiev to remove the corrupt and incompetent old guard from power last year. Now those squabbles have boiled over. Top aides to the president, Viktor Yushchenko, have resigned amid swirling allegations of corruption. And on Thursday September 8th he sacked the government, led by the fiery prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko. Her administration, the president declared, had lost its “team spirit”.

In the past week, the president’s inner circle started disintegrating. Oleksandr Zinchenko, his impressive chief of staff, resigned claiming that other advisers had organised an “information blockade” around the president, in order to “use government posts to get their hands on everything they can”. He explicitly named the national-security secretary, Petro Poroshenko, a controversial figure who has at times seemed to run a private foreign policy at variance with Mr Yushchenko’s pro-western orientation. Mr Poroshenko and a colleague resigned shortly before the whole government was sacked, followed by the head of the state-security service. But perhaps the final straw for Mr Yushchenko was the resignation of Nikolai Tomenko, a deputy prime minister, who said he was no longer prepared to put up with the venality of the president’s inner circle.

Mr Yushchenko moved quickly on Thursday to plug these gaps, asking Yuri Yekhanurov, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, to form a new government. “I am setting before the new team one task: the ability to work as a united team…We need to halt the disappointment in society,” said the president. He has worked closely with Mr Yekhanurov before—when they were prime minister and deputy prime minister, respectively, in 2000—but it was not immediately clear whether the appointment was interim or something more permanent. Nor is it certain to be approved by the parliament, where the president’s supporters have lacked a stable majority.

The revolution that brought Mr Yushchenko to power, named after his campaign colour, pitted him against the corrupt, often incompetent administration of President Leonid Kuchma. The government drew most of its support from the industrial, Russian-speaking southern and eastern regions, while Mr Yushchenko was much more popular in the Ukrainian-speaking west.
When the challenger finally won the election against Mr Kuchma's candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, after the rigged first round was re-run, he pledged to stamp out the dodgy-dealing that was rampant under Mr Kuchma and to strengthen Ukraine’s ties to the European Union and America.

But it did not take long for things to start going wrong. Economic reform stalled while inflation climbed. This, say people who tried to advise the government, was partly because of Mrs Timoshenko’s short attention span, and also because of deep divisions within the government between those who genuinely wanted to reform the country and those who wanted merely to rejig the old arrangements to their advantage.

In particular, much time and energy was spent on the question of the allegedly fraudulent privatisations of Ukraine’s heavy industry under the old regime. Some in the new government seemed more interested in score-settling and asset-grabbing than fairness. Huge sums were at stake, and the desire of Ukraine’s oligarchs to hold on to their gains, ill-gotten or not, may be at the root of the current upheaval.

Mrs Timoshenko dithered on the privatisation issue. In other areas, her problem was rashness. The most egregious example came when she imposed price caps on fuel, alleging an anti-Ukrainian conspiracy by Russian energy firms. Predictably, this measure led to fuel shortages.
Mr Yushchenko intervened to remove the caps, and relations between the two soured; they deteriorated further when Mr Yushchenko said the government had bungled the nationalisation of a metals plant owned by investors with links to the former regime. The president never forgot that Mrs Timoshenko’s stirring oratory had brought thousands on to the streets in support of him during last year’s revolution. But he also came to see that she could be more of a liability than an asset in government.

Mr Yushchenko let the side down, too, failing to live up to his stellar reputation as a reformer (which always mystified those who remembered his undistinguished stint as prime minister). He did make some stabs at reform: sacking the country’s entire traffic police, who were detested for their corruption, was a high point. But his own reputation has frayed. His son’s extravagant lifestyle (involving tycoon’s toys like a $40,000 mobile phone) came under close scrutiny; contradictory and angry responses by Mr Yushchenko and others made matters worse.

There are fears that Ukrainian politics may be about to get a lot nastier. Mr Yushchenko held out an olive branch to his outgoing prime minister and her cabinet on Thursday, saying: “These people remain my friends. It is very difficult but today I must remove this Gordian knot.” But Mrs Timoshenko—who is yet to comment publicly on her dismissal—may not see it that way. Analysts predict a noisy showdown between the rival orange camps in the parliamentary elections that are due in March.

All of which is worrying for Ukraine’s western friends. America and the EU threw their weight behind the orange revolution, aware that Mr Yushchenko was keen to remove his country of 47m from Russia’s sphere of influence. In April, during a visit by Mr Yushchenko to America, Ukraine was offered fast-track talks on joining the NATO defence alliance and the World Trade Organisation. The country also hopes to join the EU, one day. For Mr Yushchenko’s western cheerleaders, the latest developments in Kiev are disappointing.

But they are even more upsetting for Ukrainians. Having booted out one lot of corrupt and incompetent rulers, they could do so again. But this time there are no obvious candidates to lead the opposition.

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