Ukraine: Denouement

So, finally, we have a government. It’s been four months in the making, but we’ve got one. As so often, these things look chaotic as they’re unfolding, but in hindsight they make an odd kind of sense.

I won’t bother to explain in detail what’s happened – if you care, you can find out easily enough from other sources. But just to follow on from where I left off last time:
- an ‘anti-crisis coalition’ is formed by the Party of the Regions (Tories), Socialists (Lib Dems), and Communists, and puts Yanukovych forward as PM
- constitutional vagaries mean that Yushchenko has 15 days to decide whether to accept this candidacy, and can call repeat elections if he feels like
- it goes down to the wire. Yushchenko promises to come on TV on deadline night, apparently threatening elections, and then disappears into negotiations with Yanukovych
- eventually, at 2am, they announce that they’ve found compromises on various things so Yushchenko will accept Yanukovych as PM

There are many different ways in which this is all being presented, of course. Having read dozens of reports on Ukraine over the last few days, the main questions seem to be: Is it the end of the Orange Revolution? Or is it a sign of democracy, however ugly, taking root? Does it mean pro-Russian politics, with Euro-Atlantic integration stagnating? Whatever, it’s a defeat for Yushchenko personally, isn’t it?

To add to the cacophony, here’s my response to each of these questions…

1. Is it the end of the Orange Revolution?

Let’s start by disaggregating three things:
a) the Orange Revolution as an event
b) the Orange Revolution as the coming to power of ‘Orange’ politicians
c) the Orange Revolution as a longer-term process

If you see it in the first way, as several weeks of protests that led to falsified election results being cancelled and new elections held, as a result of which there was a change of president, then obviously, the Orange Revolution was over in January 2005.

The big mistake, which is particularly prevalent, is to somehow think that the Orange Revolution was about certain people, and therefore the Orange Revolution is dead when these people are no longer calling the shots. This is nonsense. The protests were never born out of a desperate love for Yushchenko or Tymoshenko (and certainly not plenty of other politicians in the Orange camp). They were born out of a rejection of the old system: falsified elections; a controlled press; massive corruption; major crimes unpunished; arbitrary governance and justice; terrible standards of living despite sexy figures for growing GDP; and a state that treated its citizens like cattle, to be pushed around and milked. All that the Orange camp did right was to sound more convincing than Yanukovych in rejecting this state of affairs and promising some new ideals.

In fact, as became clear very soon after Yushchenko and his posse came to power, many of the people in this camp either didn’t really give a damn about these ideals and had just used them to come to power, or they did care but were too incompetent and lacked enough mass and coordination to achieve anything. The result is that in terms of concrete politicians, the Orange Revolution was actually more or less dead long ago (even if kept on life-support), since it was clear within a few months that the ‘Orange’ government wasn’t going to achieve most of the things it promised. Yushchenko, as the figurehead of all of this, suffered particularly badly.

Despite this negative outlook, in amongst it all there have been some changes for the better – i.e. the Orange Revolution as a longer-term process. Some credit has to go here to the much-maligned Orangery. No longer do we have temnyky, orders to the media from the presidential administration about what should be reported and how. The parliamentary elections were free and fair, if a little disorganized, and the post-election crisis has at least been about horse-trading rather than vote-rigging, a step forward that is already taken for granted. And there has been notable progress in a few areas where more enlightened ministers are in charge (perhaps surprisingly, defence is the main success story).

But the Orange Revolution was never just about the government – it was about average Ukrainians saying ‘stop, I’ve had enough of this’. And you need to look at the situation here as well, to really answer the question of whether the Orange Revolution is dead.

It’s also the most difficult question to answer. On one level, things have definitely changed, and maybe the real results will only be seen in 10-15 years time, with a whole new generation coming through that sees things very differently. Maybe, longer term, the Orange Revolution will have been an important psychological shift for Ukrainians, in a way that we still cannot appreciate.

Maybe not, however. One of the things I have become increasingly obsessed about while here is that the vast majority of Ukrainians seem to be inhibited as much by their attitudes and Weltausschauung as by the situation in which they find themselves. Which is not to say that many people aren’t in a pretty awful situation, and isn’t too say that people aren’t afflicted with a political class that makes everything that much harder, but at the end of the day, we all know that the hardest revolution of all is the personal revolution. And for people of my generation and older, I’m not sure how much of a mental shift there really was, for those who didn’t already think very differently. A lot of people, including some of our closest friends here, were out on the streets protesting, but you don’t really get the feeling that they have changed the way in which they interact with their fellow citizens, the way they run their businesses, the way they engage in politics, the way they deal with corrupt or useless officials in their daily lives, etc, etc…

Even worse, there is a danger that what with the political collapse and economic stumbles of the Orange government, the whole concept of turning Ukraine into a truly European society (with a half-decent democracy, half-decent economy, half-decent relationship between citizens and the state, etc) will be perceived as discredited – you had your chance and you blew it – and mentally, the country might stagger back towards the strong-arm, ‘vertical of power’ leadership tactics that Mr Putin is showing everyone can be so successful.

As far as the Orange Revolution as a process goes, then, it’s just too early to say. One early marker will be whether Yanukovych and his ministers take up where they left in 2004 as though nothing has changed, or whether they do try and play by new rules. It would be quite easy, if they want to, to reverse the few good things that the Orange Revolution has brought. But it’s also the next permutation of ‘democracy’, and its results, for better or for worse, will also help to shape people’s longer term views, especially since people still not seem to be ready to take more responsibility for changing Ukraine on themselves…

2. Is it a sign of democracy, however ugly, taking root?

The process that has led Yanukovych to power was, undoubtedly, democratic. Very ugly, but democratic. Where I have my doubts is to whether democracy has actually taken root yet, or whether it could just be pulled up and thrown away like a weed…

Yanukovych became PM democratically. Firstly, he was always very popular among a significant proportion of the electorate. This isn’t like Georgia, where Shevardnadze and his cronies disappeared overnight, and Saakashvili got 96% in the new elections. Even after all the protests, Yanukovych’s support was not that far shy of half the country. And in the March elections, his party did by far the best, since the ‘Orange’ parties were massively divided. He then managed to form a coalition after extremely dodgy and depressing horse-trading, and this left an extremely nasty taste in the mouth. But essentially, the seats in parliament and the coalition formed on this basis were done democratically, and there’s no getting away from it.

The question, as I’ve already raised, is whether things have changed enough that the democratic institutions here that are taking root (free elections and a free press) are allowed to do so – or whether he and his buddies will just crush these institutions now they have regained power. We shall soon see. If you have a more transparent system, then he and his party will have a proper democratic challenge: govern properly, and people will support you – fail obviously, and even many of your more fanatic supporters will leave you. But if you crush the tools that allow people to make that judgement….But we’ll soon see how he really intends to govern…

3. Does it mean pro-Russian politics, with Euro-Atlantic integration stagnating?

As the Germans say, jein. What seems most likely is that there’ll be much more pro-Russian rhetoric, which might not be a bad thing if it helps to remove the tensions. The big question is whether the Party of the Regions will actually adopt policies that are seen as being more in Russia’s interests than Ukraine’s. Obviously, this is difficult to analyse since opinions tend to differ on what counts as Ukraine’s national interests, but the general direction will soon become clear. There’s various reasons to hope that in fact, the change will come only at the level of rhetoric, not policy, because even those in the more pro-Russian East don’t actually see an advantage in adopting too pro-Russian policies: they could make the country unmanageable, leaving them as kings without a castle; they could reduce their own field of play and thus their own business interests; they could damage their relationship with the West, which would also play against their strategic and business interests longer term…

With the EU and NATO…well, let’s start with the EU. We’re still far from a breakthrough. Despite the good will generated by the Orange Revolution, in practice, both sides have not done enough to make the relationship stronger. So it’s not as if we’re moving headlong into European integration at the moment…again, it seems that even Yanukovych’s party sees the advantages in closer ties with the EU, particularly economic ties, so we shouldn’t expect a rejection of the EU. As with Turkey, the EU will continue to be attractive to Ukrainians until the EU insults them enough that they get the message that they’re not wanted and go elsewhere. In this sense, the ball’s in the EU’s court, no matter who makes up the Ukrainian doubles team….

As for NATO, this was much more controversial, and was a major sticking point during the last four months of negotiations. The situation now is that the strongly reformist, strongly pro-NATO Defence Minister will stay, and that the key parties have agreed that Ukraine will continue to integrate with NATO, until the moment of truth: membership can then be agreed only via a referendum. This is probably the best outcome at the moment, agreeing this was more the recognition on both sides of the current state of affairs. The referendum, when it comes, will be hard to win, given the deep suspicion towards NATO in much of the country, but that’s democracy for you. But the process of moving towards NATO, which requires not only defence modernisation but also political changes, is definitely in Ukraine’s interests.

4. Whatever, it’s a defeat for Yushchenko personally, isn’t it?

Yes, of course, but let’s diagnose the problem correctly. To Westerners who don’t follow Ukrainian politics, the whole situation seems incomprehensible, and must be a massive defeat. In Ukraine, however, just how much of a defeat you think it was depends on how highly you esteem the concessions Yushchenko managed to wring out of Yanukovych before accepting him as PM, and whether you think that accepting Yanukovych as PM was a way of ‘uniting’ the country or an act of treason.

Either way, the key thing to remember is that all the grounds for the ‘defeat’ were created long before the parliamentary elections or the post-election negotiations. You knew how the cards were going to be dealt, and unless Yushchenko had played a spectacular bluff with his atrocious hand, he was never going to come out of it with all the poker chips.

As I’ve indicated above, Orange politicians had been a source of disappointment for many months already, and as the guy at the top, unable to control the process, Yushchenko has received much of the harshest criticism, much of which is deserved. However, this post is long enough already so I won’t even begin to start listing all the mistakes that have been made.

Lastly

Lastly, let me just say that on a personal level, the last few months have been an unwelcome catalyst for me to look at various sides of life in Ukraine that I find myself either unable to get used to, unwilling to get used to, or just depressed by. Expect me to, um, grumble about them over the next few months. There’s still many great things about Ukraine, not least my wife of course, but the further you get ‘inside’ this country, the easier it becomes to understand why it’s in such a mess, and the harder it becomes to believe that things are going to get sorted out for the better any time soon. And given that we’ve only got one life, well, just how much effort should you make in a place like this, when there’s plenty of places where it’s much easier to earn much more money and have a stable, comfortable life for much less hassle?