Ukraine has only a year for implement radical reforms

Ukraine’s pre-term parliamentary election on October 26 will elect a new parliament that will be undoubtedly pro-European but the jury is still out if it will lead to long overdue reforms and a strong fight against corruption.
Ukraine’s new parliament will be overwhelmingly pro-European. But the Europeanization of Ukraine’s parliament will not necessarily lead to the radical reforms and a strong commitment to fighting corruption that Ukrainians and the west seek.
The five or six political forces that will enter parliament are ‘virtual’ forces without the political power to push through reform. President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc includes his own Solidarity party and Kiev mayor and boxing champion Vitaliy Klitschko’s UDAR (Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms) who will get around 40 per cent of the seats up for election. They will form a coalition with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk’s Popular Front, created quickly in time for the elections after he split from Yulia Timoshenko, leader of the Fatherland party.
Both parties in the Poroshenko bloc lack the regional backing and political structure to push through reform. They include the largest number of members of the former regime, making many wonder if they can deliver the changes demanded by Ukrainian society. Yatseniuk’s government has blamed the war with Russia for not introducing radical reforms this year but such excuses are wearing thin on Ukrainians and on western governments.
The inability of the courts and the prosecutor’s office to indict senior politicians for abuse of office, and the frequency with which they have been able to bribe judges or flee abroad, is encouraging the public to take direct action. As one Ukrainian blogger wrote, ‘You either jail them, or people will start beating them’ while the nationalist Right Sector has warned, ‘we are going to fight these bastards’.
Ukrainians are increasingly impatient at the slow pace of change and the enduring impunity of the country’s elites. Politicians and election candidates have been thrown into wheeled trash bins and had paint thrown over them. Assaults on politicians are taking place in Kiev and throughout the country.
Poroshenko himself has been inconsistent. He appointed a former police officer not professionally qualified to be Prosecutor-General, while bowing to parliamentary pressure to sign into law a bill designed to exclude from office former officials of the administration of ousted president Viktor Yanukovich, former KGB officers and current Russian spies. Such lustration has only been undertaken in five (Poland, Czech Republic and the three Baltic states) of the 27 former Soviet states.
Opaque funding for parties and candidates continues to come from the shadow economy, which accounts for half of Ukraine’s GDP, and from accounts held offshore in the EU and tax havens. Ukraine’s gas lobby, whose leader Dmytro Firtash is on bail in Vienna awaiting extradition to the US on charges of corruption, has influence in the Poroshenko bloc and is providing financing to the Radical Party and Civic Initiative, in second and fourth place respectively in the polls.
Of the political forces that will enter parliament, very few include new faces. Indeed, of the nearly 7, 000 candidates, 130 voted on January 16 in support of legislation that transformed Ukraine into a dictatorship and turned the Euromaidan protests violent. Poroshenko must show Ukrainians and the west that he would no longer support ‘business as usual’ for oligarchs.
Ukraine has only a year or two to meet the deeply held demands for change from Ukrainian society and the west. Failing to implement these changes could lead to further popular protests, this time more violent in a country flush with weapons, and Ukraine fatigue in the west. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is hoping for precisely such an outcome.
 

Продолжение здесь: IPnews

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