Pro-Western parties sign historic coalition agreement

Five of the six parties parties elected to the Rada in the Oct. 26 parliamentary election joined the broad coalition, including the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko, the People’s Front led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Samopomich (Self-Help) party, Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party and Batkivshchyna led by ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. 

Only two of the parties, Batkivshcyhna and the Radical Party, existed a year ago.  

“This government will be jointly responsible to the Ukrainian people for fulfilling every point and every promise which we made,” Yatsenyuk said before signing the agreement. “This agreement provides difficult, painful but essential reforms for the state, and there may be applause, but for sure not in the immediate future. It will have to be earned.”

Yatsenyuk also said the new government should be formed within 10 days and asked all five parties to nominate their candidates. Samopomich will not nominate anyone, according to Oksana Syroid, one of its newly-elected members of parliament.

Yatsenyuk is expected to stay on in his role. 

On Nov. 14 he said Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak and Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin should stay on in their positions. Previously he also stated Interior Minister Arsen Avakov should continue in his post.  

The coalition will have 289 seats in the 450-seat body. It will provide the new government with a huge mandate for change. But expectations will be high with the Ukrainian economy contracting and the Russian-backed war in the east bringing fresh casualties daily.

In a setback to Russia, the agreement identifies both EU integration and NATO membership as priorities for the new parliament. Russia has sought to keep Ukraine out of the EU and NATO spheres of influence since last summer in the run up to the Vilnius summit when Ukraine was expect to sign an association agreement with the EU. Yanukovych suddenly backed out of signing the agreement sparking the first EuroMaidan protests that would force him out of office. 

“Tonight I realized I haven’t left Maidan for 10 years. Maidan did a lot (to fight) the old system but it hasn’t done anything that the West was asking us for,” Yuri Lutsenko, presidential adviser and member of parliament elected from Poroshenko Bloc said. “That is what society wants today.”

Now that the coalition agreement has been signed, pressure is on party leaders to deliver reforms — from energy to defense to judicial — both to prove themselves to the electorate and keep the faith of Ukraine’s Western backers. Ukraine has greatly diminished foreign currency reserves, hovering to $10 billion.  It is dependent on Western support to secure new loans from the International Monetary Fund, whose $17 billion bailout is now seen as inadequate for a country where the currency has already lost half its value against the dollar. 

Some experts see the delays in signing the coalition agreements as a sign that the politicians will struggle to stay united. 

“An obvious question is why, given the huge pressures being felt now on Ukraine, did it take reform politicians more than one month after parliamentary elections to forge this coalition,” said Timothy Ash, head of emerging market research for Standard Bank in London.

In the coming weeks one of the main tests for the new parliament is whether it can resist the backdoor deals and political horse trading that have defined previous Ukrainian parliaments.

“The greatest single risk factor in Ukraine is business as usual. It’s a bigger threat than Russian tanks and Chechen mercenaries,” says Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine on Nov. 19 at the Kyiv Post Tiger Conference.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the Kyiv Post Reform Watch project, sponsored by the International Renaissance Foundation. Content is independent of the financial donors. The newspaper is grateful to the sponsors for supporting Ukraine’s free press and making specialized coverage of reforms possible through this project.