Transitions Online explique en quoi le célèbre personnage de bande dessinée pourrait constituer un exemple à suivre pour les responsables politiques ukrainiens.
Viktor Yushchenko was last week supposed to be in Poland at an economic forum in Krynica, a relaxing spa-town setting at which, no doubt, to renew Ukraine’s claim to eventual EU membership. Instead, he spent a febrile week back in Kyiv watching his government disintegrate. Finally, in his own words “frustrated,” Ukraine’s president stepped in and swept away the remnants of the government. Three of the president’s closest associates from the revolution are, for the time being, out of power. Ukraine’s first post-revolutionary phase is over.
His Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is surely gleeful. Even before the Ukrainian government fell, he had responded to divisions within the Ukrainian cabinet and allegations of corruption by telling Western journalists that « we said this before and no one wanted to listen to us – and we have to be listened to.”
The brighter side…
Putin could have found good reasons for suggesting Ukraine’s Orange Revolution would inevitably flounder. He didn’t and instead reached the wrong conclusion: the current problems in no way reduce the justification for the revolution. But, more importantly, he is missing a key point: that one factor contributing to the government’s collapse may actually help Ukraine’s democracy.
The argument that the government headed by Yulia Tymoshenko was bound to hit the rocks is simple. From Latin America to the former Soviet Union, opposition groups have realized that often the best way to overthrow an entrenched regime is to unite into a single movement. When success cuts the bonds that bound them, it is natural that unnatural partners will go their own way (or, when they remain together, like Serbia’s one-time 17-party ruling coalition, that they will spend much of their time in enervating in-fighting).
In Ukraine, the opposition was, if anything, particularly likely to split. First, one of the factors that enabled the opposition to remove the old system in late 2004 was precisely the political system’s fragmentation: ex-President Leonid Kuchma and his supporters were always too divided and Ukraine’s politics and its system too fractious for them to consolidate authority in the manner(s) achieved by Putin and Belarus’ Alyaksandr Lukashenka. To watch the Ukrainian political scene before the revolution was to watch a kaleidoscope, with members of parliament constantly moving from faction to faction and new constellations of power forming with every twist of events. From the moment the revolution ended that fragmentation began again, with some of Kuchma’s supporters gravitating to the new powers-that-be and some of Yushchenko’s fellow-revolutionaries – notably, the Socialists – immediately trying to catch some homeless or discontented left-wing politicians. With the dismissal of the Tymoshenko government, the kaleidoscope is again changing shape and color fast.
The second reason why it was very probable the opposition parties would part ways was that, come parliamentary elections in March 2006, the real power in the country should no longer be Yushchenko but the prime minister. A presidential system common in the former Soviet Union will become a parliamentary system familiar to Westerners. It was perhaps natural, then, that factions within the government would begin, as they have, to clash and accuse each other as they maneuvered for pole position in the election race – particularly when the forces that gathered around Viktor Yanukovych in last year’s presidential elections remain weak. The government’s fall is, then, partly an unwelcome by-product of a welcome change.
And nor should the accompanying loss of revolutionary innocence be a particular cause of lament. In 1989, the Czechoslovak dissidents who led the Velvet Revolution hoped their movements – Civic Forum and Public Against Violence – would remain political forces, but amorphous organizations with their raison d’etre already a matter of history are hardly an ideal mechanism to cope with dramatic challenges. If one consequence of the Ukrainian government’s collapse and the change in political system is a stronger party-political system, then something positive will have emerged.
To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.