With a new coalition in the Rada Ukraine can move on.

Despite a unanimous verdict from international observers that Ukraine’s presidential election was free and fair, Yulia Tymoshenko has continued to accuse Victor Yanukovych of stealing upwards of 1,000,000 votes on his way to victory.

Now, the Orange coalition built around Tymoshenko in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has dissolved, after it failed to prove that it can any longer command a majority.

Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions will attempt to construct its own coalition, in order to implement the programme which Ukrainian voters endorsed at the polls. Tymoshenko has responded by questioning the legitimacy of any arrangement which might emerge.

The new President’s victory has not proved universally popular, but he emerged with a mandate to clear up the mess created by his predecessor Yushchenko and the Rada government led by Tymoshenko.

Ukraine’s politics have long been factional and fragmented, and it is hardly surprising that the prime minister has lost control of the Rada in the wake of the election. Yanukovych’s party is entitled to investigate whether it can form a government.

The vitality and competitiveness of Ukraine’s election has been applauded throughout the world. The people having spoken, however, it is time to put aside the politics of accusation and allow the country to return to normality.

Yanukovych is hardly the world’s slickest politician, but he is reluctant to allow his country to be used as the rope in an endless tug of war between ‘the west’ and Russia. If he sets aside Yuschenko’s anti-Kremlin grandstanding and makes meaningful progress on the economy, then his presidency will benefit Ukraine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more