ANALYSIS
Out with the old, in with the new: a wiser, firmer Leonid Kuchma?
by Markian Bilynsky
CONCLUSION
Asked during the election campaign to name the biggest disappointment of his first term in office, President Leonid Kuchma identified the Verkhovna Rada's failure to produce a pro-reform majority. At first this seemed something of a curious response given the disarray within an executive branch that is de facto subordinated to the administration (a situation that led the president on several occasions to lament that his decrees and instructions are routinely ignored).
However, the problem is legitimate and arguably would form the weakest link in the kind of system of trilateral, shared responsibility between the Rada, the government, and the administration that President Kuchma called for moments before Viktor Yuschenko's confirmation vote. Judging by his statements, the new prime minister also is heavily counting on this sharing of responsibilities.
A couple of days after the vote, the leaders of the 11 parties and groups constituting the basis of Mr. Yuschenko's success initialed an "Agreement on the Formation of a Parliamentary Majority." Its initiators hailed this as a new phase in the development of Ukrainian parliamentarianism. In order to become politically meaningful, the document must now be signed by at least 226 national deputies.
This initiative is proceeding without the support of the Rada chairman, Oleksander Tkachenko, whose all-round credibility suffered a major blow as a result of both his own inept presidential campaign and his subsequent support of the Communist candidate, Petro Symonenko. Given Chairman Tkachenko's identification with what now constitutes the parliamentary opposition, it is very difficult to see how he could survive if a stable, pro-reform majority materializes.
The issue of cooperation between the Verkhovna Rada majority, the president and the new government is supposed to be codified in an "Agreement on Cooperation and Joint Responsibility." A draft document is being prepared within the Parliament.
However, at a December 28, 1999, press briefing, recently appointed chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn pointed out that many of its provisions were unacceptable to the administration because they would allegedly burden the president with a disproportionate share of responsibility. More emphatically, meeting with the press a day later, presidential press secretary Oleksander Martynenko stated in a manner that sounded a bit like back-peddling that President Kuchma was not prepared to compromise any of his constitutional prerogatives, adding that the president would only be prepared to work with a parliamentary majority that acknowledged the program on which he had been re-elected.
The administration has already issued statements casting doubt over the Verkhovna Rada's ability to form a stable majority. Its skepticism is not unfounded. There are, after all, substantial policy differences among the deputies who voted for Mr. Yuschenko. Moreover, Ukrainian politicians have developed an almost fetishistic reverence for all kinds of cooperative agreements, documents and memoranda of understanding. These are often heralded with a solemnity that cannot disguise the fact that they are little more than vacuous declarations, not legally binding, and usually observed only in the breach - if not ignored completely.
However, this peculiarity of contemporary Ukrainian political culture aside, there is another, more specific reason why the cooperation efforts might flounder: while relations with the Verkhovna Rada are in principle a priority for the administration, including the president himself, cooperating with the Rada in its current incarnation does not appear to be.
President Kuchma and his administration have long harbored deep reservations concerning the Verkhovna Rada's institutional inadequacies. Some of these doubts were expressed immediately after the adoption of the Constitution. For example, appearing at a joint press conference a couple of days after its adoption, then Chief of Staff Dmytro Tabachnyk, and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Volodymyr Horbulin, complained that the Constitution's single biggest defect was the failure to create a second chamber that would, so the argument went, act as a buffer against an overtly politicized lower chamber.
During the first Kuchma term the relations between the branches of government came to resemble, in the president's recent depiction, "a crazy war." Judging from its pronouncements on the topic, the administration appears to see a radical restructuring of the Rada as the primary means for reducing tension along this principal vector of political confrontation. Thus, while on several occasions expressing a willingness to work with the current Rada until the next parliamentary elections in 2002 if a reliable majority is formed, both President Kuchma and administration officials have nevertheless simultaneously and repeatedly stated that a referendum about the restructuring of the Rada is inevitable, irrespective of whether a reform majority actually transpires.
All of this might, of course, simply be a case of crafting a bluff more carefully in order to make it more believable. The referendum-followed-by-elections gambit had been used successfully by President Kuchma to clinch passage of the constitutional agreement in 1995 and the Constitution itself a year later. That on this occasion the president might be intending to go beyond cowing the Parliament into forming a pro-reform majority might be inferred from the four questions the referendum would address: the need for the Constitution to be adopted through popular referendum rather than by the Verkhovna Rada; the abolition of a national deputy's immunity once criminal charges are made; the creation of a bicameral Rada; and the president's right to dismiss the Rada if it fails to form a majority or to adopt a budget within three months.
A strong case can be made that whole referendum process and the implications of its results are not unambiguous from a legal perspective, and that the referendum cannot therefore be used as a pretext for dismissing the Verkhovna Rada because the conditions for its dismissal are laid out in the Constitution itself. What the referendum should do - given the nature of the questions proposed - is set in motion a complex procedure for amending the Constitution, a procedure in which the Rada plays the central role. In short, the referendum essentially would be a consultative exercise whose outcome the Rada would be obliged to take into consideration, but no more than that. There were genuine fears in some quarters during the confrontations in 1995 and 1996 that the president would use the Rada's persistently low popularity (relative to his) as a pretext for acting in a pre-emptory manner. And, with democracy having undergone some stern trials and taken on peculiar forms in other parts of the former USSR, these fears have not been dispelled.
The fact that President Kuchma and his circle began publicly making the case for a referendum even before the presidential campaign was over reveals the depth of the administration's conviction on this matter. Citizens' initiative groups also began to be organized (most conspicuously by deputies close to the president) at that time, and by the end of December 1999, 281 had been registered in order to collect the 3 million signatures required for initiating the referendum.
Moreover, following his re-election, presidential spokesmen have increasingly couched the issues in terms of a "popularly elected" president being unable to proceed with his "mandate" because of a recalcitrant Parliament - a situation often described as "impermissible." These arguments are contentious. But this does not mean that they do not strike a note with a politically wearied public that, according to almost every poll on the issue, declares itself overwhelmingly in favor of democracy, yet simultaneously, and in almost equal proportions, yearns for a firm hand.
It is not clear at present where events will lead. The only thing that can be stated confidently is that the administration has harbored a long-term simmering discontent with the Verkhovna Rada's form and prerogatives and has invested a lot of credibility in publicly and unequivocally voicing its determination to act. Indeed, some forces within the administration, or close to it, perhaps buoyed by their patron's electoral success, still appear to harbor misconceptions regarding the nature of representative democracy and the separation of powers - even as defined by Ukrainian law.
They leave a distinct impression of impatience, even irritation, over its essentially untidy nature compared to the enforced orderliness of Soviet democratic centralism and apparently fail to appreciate that collectively the Rada, as the highest representative body, is no less an expression of the popular will than the president.
As some commentators have argued, resorting to a referendum with all the uncertainties this entails is equivalent - in the current Ukrainian context - to wielding an unproven weapon. But perhaps the very uncertainty that this entails could, as precedent suggests, once again produce an outcome more or less to the president's liking. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a pro-reform (though not necessarily pro-Kuchma) majority within the Rada - and under a new leadership - could adopt some of the changes the administration would like to introduce through the referendum of its own volition - including pre-term elections.
Indeed, if the president does pursue the referendum option, this would be one of the few ways of reconciling his very recent statement that he had no intention of dissolving the Verkhovna Rada and that anyone who thought he was going to do so should undergo a psychiatric examination.
Some politicians and analysts who believe that events in Russia to a large extent presage developments in Ukraine believe that the outcome of the recent Russian parliamentary elections, which returned a potentially pro-government Duma, corroborates the view that President Kuchma's re-election shows that Ukrainian society, too, has broken decisively with the past and that pre-term parliamentary elections should be held to take advantage of an opportunity to elect a more progressive, coherent Rada.
This argument could prove particularly appealing to some of the newer, potentially influential parties that feel they could ride into the Rada on the coat-tails of the president's perceived popularity. It could appeal as well as to that non-left majority of the 90 officially registered Ukrainian political parties that, imbued with a sense of almost providential mission, attribute their failure to gain any representation - or their underrepresentation - in the Rada to an electorate previously insufficiently sophisticated to appreciate their message (rather than the possibility that their message might be intrinsically unappealing or is, correctly, perceived to be simply a vehicle for personal ambitions.)
And what of the new government? A Yuschenko premiership could become an expression of and catalyst for much of what can be constructive - even decent - in Ukrainian politics. Whether this pragmatic ideologue can translate intent into effective government will depend not only on the goodwill and support of the Rada but also on the government's ability to fashion a cooperative relationship with the legislature on its terms rather than the administration's.
This is a difficult but urgent task because the well-defined fault lines in the Ukrainian political system will undoubtedly begin to be stressed again during the 100 day period Prime Minister Yuschenko identified in his appearance before the Rada as the time-frame for the adoption and implementation of "indispensable measures" - beginning with the introduction of an unprecedented surplus-creating budget that promises to cut deeply into much-cherished tax exemptions and subsidies.
Immediately after the election Mr. Tabachnyk, one of the architects of President Kuchma's victory, declared that President Kuchma would move decisively because he was aware that what he now did would determine his place in history. If this is indeed the case, then perhaps the "new" President Kuchma will allow the government - representing as it does a younger generation, currently a very fashionable and appealing designation in this part of the world - to produce the kinds of results by which he would like to be remembered. This would mean contributing to the creation of an environment conducive to cooperation.
A renewed confrontation between the administration and the Verkhovna Rada cannot but impact the relationship between the government and the Parliament, and again lead to the tediously familiar and detrimental over-politicization of the policy process that has been the bane of Ukrainian political life to date - something Ukraine can no longer afford.
Markian Bilynskyj is director of the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy in Kyiv.
CONCLUSION
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 30, 2000, No. 5, Vol. LXVIII
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