A president under siege

Winter gloom has settled over the Presidential Administration building on Bankivska. The lord of the manor goes around snarling vague threats at shadow business tycoons and foreign media interests. His aides, beset by foes of all stripes, can't seem to agree on Public Enemy Number One: Lazarenko? Tymoshenko? Marchuk? Symonenko? Moroz? Holovaty? Brodsky? Even the gargoyles across the street seem to be scowling more than usual. Kuchma and friends have a right to be edgy. The capital's major newspapers, controlled by the president's various rivals, daily ridicule the ruling regime's low public standing while pretending that their sponsors are more popular. The government's proudest accomplishment, the allegedly stable hryvna, teeters on the verge of a devaluation. The March parliamentary elections appear destined to produce a legislature even more hostile and unmanageable than the current bunch. And the near-bankruptcy of the public purse means that the government can't even control the damage by bribing voters with spending increases.

Politics, like everything else in Ukraine, usually follows the Russian pattern. For once, though, Kyiv may be leading the way. Anyone wondering what a Viktor Chernomyrdin presidency might look like in 2001 need look no further than Kuchma's half-hearted reform drive. Like Russia's figurehead premier, the Ukrainian president has memorized all the right lines about free markets. And like Chernomyrdin, he has had trouble sounding convincing. Kuchma and his defenders are quick to blame Ukraine's glacial crawl toward capitalism on an economically illiterate and wicked Parliament. They forget that Boris Yeltsin must put up with an equally dumb Duma. The difference is that, since his heart bypass, the Russian leader has abandoned gradualism and handed real power to liberals like Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov. Meanwhile, Kuchma has dumped Viktor Pynzenyk and Serhy Holovaty in favor of a coterie of cronies. Too bad Ukraine's palace physicians don't know how to perform courage transplants. Ukraine is paying a high price for its president's penchant for mediocrity. But the cost to Kuchma himself is likely to be high as well. It is not that Holovaty and Pynzenyk themselves are serious contenders for power. It is that their ouster virtually ensures that Kuchma will face a challenge from the right as well as the left in the 1999 presidential race. And the sullying of his reformist credentials leaves little distinction between him and another 'centrist' like Marchuk.

It is not as if the president has not learned to get around the Rada when he wants to. Acting State Property Fund Chairman Volodymyr Lanovy and Acting Prosecutor General Oleh Lytvak are still on the job long after Parliament's rejection of their nomination. Kuchma's refusal to name alternative candidates amounts to a thinly-disguised end run around the constitution that should trouble even Lanovy's Western supporters.

The president has wide-ranging decree powers and complete control of the executive. He controls a blocking minority in Parliament and a likely majority on the Constitutional Court. If radical reform mattered to him as much as, say, supremacy on the airwaves, Ukraine could now be enjoying economic growth instead of wallowing in a decade-long depression.

There is not much left to do until the parliamentary election. No sane party (the Popular Democrats don't count) would now risk electoral humiliation by associating itself with the executive. But if the relatively liberal Rukh does as well as expected on March 29, Kuchma could do himself a huge favor by replacing Valery Pustovoitenko & Co. with a coalition government led by Rukh and encompassing other reformers.

They are his only realistic counterweight to well-financed, eastward-looking challengers who might turn Ukraine into either a kleptocracy or a Belarus should they triumph in 1999.

Even the gargoyles on Bankivska don't want to end up facing that.

(Igor Greenwald is the Post's editor.)