Ukraine Politics
Ukraine is a parliamentary democracy with separate executive, judicial, and legislative branches. Ukraine's presidency remains the pre-eminent post in the Ukrainian government and economic and legal reform is primarily dependent on the president's support. The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and may veto legislation. The 450-member parliament (Supreme Rada) initiates legislation, ratifies international agreements, and approves the budget. Its members were elected to four-year terms in 1994.
The prime minister is appointed and dismissed by the president, although his/her appointment is subject to parliamentary approval. The prime minister nominates and the president appoints the members of the Cabinets of Ministers. The prime minister can also be removed by a majority vote in the Verkhovna Rada. Should the prime minister be removed, the entire Cabinet of Ministers resigns.
Following free elections held on December 1, 1991, Leonid M. Kravchuk, former Chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, was elected president for a five-year term. At the same time, a referendum on independence was approved by more than 90% of the voters. Political groupings in Ukraine include former communists, socialists, agrarians, nationalists and various centrist and independent forces.
The Kuchma Era
In July 1994, Leonid D. Kuchma was elected as Ukraine's second president in free and fair elections. During the Soviet Era, in the Ukrainian SSR, the so-called "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. After Leonid Kuchma was elected president, the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" gradually regained power in Kyiv.
The election of Kuchma, a former prime minister and military-industrial manager, over Leonid M. Kravchuk, Ukraine's first elected-president and former Communist apparatchik, by a margin of 52 to 45 percent confirmed the deep regional cleavage within Ukrainian society between those who sought a unilateral, Ukrainian-national road and those who want closer economic and political ties with Russia. The vote breakdown underscored the regional dynamics with the east [large Russian minorities and Russified Ukrainians] joined by Crimea and Odessa in the south voting for Kuchma and close ties to Russia. In Central Ukraine, including the Kiev region, the electoral results were much closer with the balancing shifting between Kravchuk and Kuchma.
Ukraine’s March 1998 parliamentary resulted in the election of a parliament similar in composition to the previous parliament, albeit with a somewhat more Communist tilt. The left constituted about 40 percent of parliament’s membership, with the remainder a mix of centrists, independents and national democrats. The new parliament included many new faces -- only 141 deputies from the old parliament were in the new one. The parliamentary elections were held under a new election law which replaced the majoritarian system, introducing a mixed electoral system where half of the 450 deputies are elected from single-mandate districts and half from national party lists. While there were violations, transgressions and irregularities during the campaign and voting, Ukrainian voters generally were able to express their political will freely, and the results of the elections do appear to reflect the will of the electorate.
Kuchma was reelected in November 1999 to another five year term, with 56 percent of the vote. International observers criticized aspects of the election, especially slanted media coverage, however, the outcome of the vote was not called into question. The 1999 elections delivered a pro-Presidential, and ostentatiously pro-reform, majority in the Rada (parliament), ending temporarily the parliamentary blockade which had stalled reform for most of the 1990s.
In January 2000, a center-right pro-presidential majority was formed, breaking the left's traditional control over the legislature. This produced, for the first time since independence, a degree of cooperation among the president, prime minister and parliament, which resulted throughout most of 2000 in an improved atmosphere for the passage of reform legislation.
Ukraine has been in political turmoil since the release of secretly recorded audio tapes in November 2000, with the President’s voice apparently ordering his Interior Minister to “get rid” of Mr Georgy Gongadze, an opposition journalist. Several days prior to the release of the tapes by one of President Kuchma’s security guards, Mr Gongadze’s decapitated body was found in a forest outside Kyiv, two months after his disappearance. Apart from the reference to Mr Gongadze, the conversations contained on the tapes suggested Presidential involvement in judicial manipulation and electoral fraud. Since then, President Kuchma has acknowledged that it is his voice on the recordings, but has adamantly denied any wrongdoing claiming that the recorded conversations are a fabrication. However, this has not placated a broad and vocal anti-Kuchma opposition, the National Salvation Front, which was formed in February by a wide range of political leaders. This union has demanded the President’s resignation and launched a series of protests, some of which have been crushed by the police. As its rallying point, the National Salvation Front has used the figure of Yulia Tymoshenko, former deputy Prime Minister, who was arrested in January 2001 on corruption charges.
Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko
The Kuchma political crisis was complicated by the successful efforts of a coalition of centrist and left-wing deputies to oust reform-oriented Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko led the center-right bloc Our Ukraine, which helds just over 100 out of the 450 seats in the parliament. Yushchenko, a former chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, pushed through a number of economic reforms during his time in office. A real economic breakthrough occurred in 2000, when the new government under Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko carried out momentous market reforms, slashing subsidies to oligarchs and leveling the playing field.
The so-called oligarch factions in parliament stepped up their bid to get rid of Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko. The oligarch factions, which are largely pro-presidential, are eyed 10 April 2001, the scheduled date of the government's annual report to parliament, as the day they would initiate a vote of no-confidence in Yushchenko if the prime minister doesn't agree to form a coalition government with the acting parliamentary majority.
After the government of the reform-oriented Prime Minister Yushchenko fell to a no confidence vote in April of 2001, many observers feared that political forces in the Rada were arrayed in such a way as to make approval of a new reform-minded Prime Minister impossible. In May, the Rada confirmed the head of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Anatoliy Kinakh, as Yushchenko's successor. Immediately upon assuming office on 29 May 2001, Prime Minister Kinakh declared his intention not only to maintain the reforms of the Yushchenko era, but to accelerate them. Under the leadership of Anatoly Kinakh, the Ukrainian government pushed through tax and land reforms. Within just a few months, President Kuchma and Prime Minister Kinakh successfully lobbied the Rada to pass key reform legislation.
