As previously noted, today is the day that Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko must decide to accept bitter rival Victor Yanukovych as premier, or invent a pretext for dissolving parliament. A senior member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions has threatened to initiate impeachment procedings against Yushchenko if he dissolves parliament.
Some of the things written in the Kyiv Post (in the just-linked story) continue to amaze me. Consider their reference to the elections in March,
in which the Party of Regions led by Viktor Yanukovych trounced the pro-Western reformers who had led the 2004 Orange Revolution.
We’ve been over this before: The three parties of the then-Orange coalition won a majority of seats, and Regions remained about static, compared to elections of the recent past. (See the table of results comparing the 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections).
In March, the two “core” Orange* parties –Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine and the bloc of former premier Yulia Tymoshenko–together outpolled Regions, though came short of a majority. Their failling short of a majority was not a surprise; they knew they would need to keep the Socialists on board, as well as patch up their own differences, in order to resume governing together.
At the conclusion of the just-linked post, from September, 2005, I noted the following:
If the pro-reform forces go into the March elections separately, it will mean that post-election horse-trading, rather than any clearly expressed mandate of the voters, will be the dominant factor in determining who governs.
Post-election horse-trading, and not an electoral “trouncing” of the Orange parties, is exactly what has resulted in Yanukovych’s being on the brink of returning to power as prime minister. The new “Blue-Red” coalition was formed on account of the Socialists switching sides and the Communists deciding they like oligarchs after all.
The KPost story is actually from AP. So the KPost can’t be accused of writing such nonsense about what is happening under their nose. Only of printing it.
* As a fruit fancier, yes, I know, oranges do not have cores.
