Ukraine's real estate market is one of the hottest investment tickets in Eastern Europe right now, with speculators mulling over 10% monthly price rises and salivating at the prospect of massive profits. But while the international media has picked up on Kyiv's skyrocketing apartment prices, the biggest real estate deal in the land remains curiously under-reported.
This massive transaction is the one currently going on behind closed doors between members of the governing parliamentary coalition and those opposition MPS whose defection is being bought. Put simply, Ukraine is up for sale, and the bidding has begun. The sums involved are necessarily huge, with the figure of USD 10 million per defection being alleged last week as eleven opposition MPs switched sides, but the amount of money involved should not come as any surprise. After all, we are witnessing the gradual purchase of an entire country here, and a potentially very rich one at that.
Nor is there anything unprecedented about this process. On the contrary, Ukrainian politics witnessed such voltes face on many occasions throughout the Kuchma years, when MPs would switch parties with great regularity in a manner not unlike that of Premiership footballers transferring from one side to another before performing the ritual badge-kissing at each new club. The prevailing wind of cronyism and a general absence of any significant ideological framework underpinning Ukraine's political parties made the regular switching of loyalties all too easy and prevented anyone from being asked too many awkward questions back then, but the democratisation process ushered in by the Orange Revolution created a political landscape that appeared to offer clearly defined party groupings along broadly ideological lines.
Old habits die hard, however, and it is now increasingly clear that not everyone is interested in playing party politics if it means passing up on the huge incentives being offered or sacrificing their personal business interests, and we can as a consequence expect more defections in the coming weeks and months. There is currently an information war going on to encourage even more opposition members to cross the divide, with the ruling 'Crisis Coalition' now referring to itself as the 'Coalition of National Unity' and boasting that it will be able to form a constitutional majority of three hundred deputies by early May, which would effectively mean that a party which received 32% of the vote last March would be in a position to dictate to the country, having first purchased the right to do so from the very souls who were elected by the Ukrainian people on a pro-democracy ticket. If this particular sale goes through, it will surely only be a matter of time before international property speculators start getting cold feet about all those beautiful apartment blocks and wondering whether Ukraine is really such an up-and-coming option after all, but such considerations are unlikely to influence the new owners, who have their own interests to consider.
