According to the Ukrainian constitution the vote for parliamentary speaker should be conducted via secret ballot. However, fears over alleged attempts to bribe individual members of the Orange coalition were used to justify a process more akin to a public show of coalition discipline as individual members of the country’s Orange parties appeared to display their votes to party leaders, who in turn stood guard over the ballot box.
Regions slam sham vote
This novel approach to combating backroom horse-trading was met by derision from the Party of Regions parliamentary faction, with acting PM Vitkor Yanukovych labeling the process “Humiliating.” Other Party of Regions MPs attempted to physically disrupt the voting process, with Regions MP Vasyl Kiselyov actually tearing up coalition member Serhiy Teryokhin’s ballot paper. Kiselyov, who famously accused Yulia Tymoshenko of enlisting the help of mind-bending mystics during the recent election campaign, defended his destruction of the BYUT member’s ballot, claiming Teryokhin, “had impudently thrust his ballot paper right in front of my eyes.”
Our Ukraine Bloc leader Yuriy Lutsenko responded with humour to attempts made to sabotage the speaker vote, telling journalists that he did not rule out the possibility of Party of Regions representatives eating ballots during the vote-counting procedure. “It’s not a problem. We will simply keep voting until they are full up,” he quipped.
No more chair-trading?
The election of Yatsenyuk, by the slimmest of two-vote margins, brought to an end two months of wrangling over the speaker post. President Yushchenko is thought to have been behind long-running efforts to negotiate a compromise speaker deal with the Party of Regions in a bid to strengthen his weakened bargaining position against a resurgent Yulia Tymoshenko. Yushchenko was ultimately forced to abandon this strategy when members of his own Our Ukraine party refused to betray the Orange coalition and threatened to form a majority by expelling rebel MPs and inviting the Lytvyn Bloc into a governing coalition.
Soon after the election of the new speaker was confirmed the presidential administration announced that Yushchenko had accepted the candidacy of Yulia Tymoshenko for the post of prime minister, with a parliamentary vote now expected on December 11.
There appears little that can now obstruct Tymoshenko’s triumphant procession back to the office from which she was removed so unceremoniously in September 2005.
Unlike the election of the speaker, the parliamentary vote for prime minister will be a public ballot, which should leave little room open for the possibility of any double-dealing and reduces the chances of any members of the outgoing government successfully buying off Orange coalition MPs.
Once in office a new Tymoshenko-led government would have a number of pressing issues to finalise before the end of the year, including the details of a new gas deal with Russia.
