Yatsenyuk’s party drops in polls as scandals swirl around prime minister

Yushchenko, of course, went from popularly elected Orange Revolution hero on Dec.16, 2014 to the political dustbin in the 2010 presidential election, getting just 5.5 percent of the vote in the first round. Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Parliament faction also disintegrated, failing to enough votes in the 2012 election.

While the public doesn’t elect the prime minister, strong Parliament support is crucial to securing and keeping the post.

And Narodny Front, the party headed by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has suffered a massive fall in public support, according to a recent nationwide poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

The poll, which was published on June 11, indicates that the party’s rating has plummeted from 22 percent last October after the parliamentary elections to only 1.6 percent last month.

Narodny (People’s) Front commands 81 seats in the 422-seat parliament as part of the ruling coalition with President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc and Samopomich Party, among other lawmakers.

Yatsenyuk has a 24 percent public approval rating, polling firm Research & Branding found in March. Last year his popularitystood at 36 percent.

“In Ukraine (responsibility for) the authorities’ performance is often placed on the shoulders of one person in the popular consciousness,”said Volodymyr Fesenko of the Penta Center for Political Studies.

Yatsenyuk’s supporters would say that he is losing support because he is making the unpopular, but necessary, economic reforms to rid the nation of its post-Soviet legacy of crony capitalism and corruption. His critics would say the opposite – that the prime minister is not undertaking the radical transformations necessary for Ukraine to emerge as a democratic, free-market nation.

Political scandals are also damaging the prime minister’s reputation, according to Fesenko, especially public ones.

One notable incident involved the dismissal of Mykola Gordienko as head of the State Financial Inspection in April after he accused Yatsenyuk’s government of corruption totaling more than Hr 7.6 billion.

And Yatsenyuk has also made powerful enemies.

The prime minister has threatened to reclaim property belonging to oligarch and media mogul Dmytro Firtash, alleging the oligarch’s firms owe Hr 6 billion in debts to state-owned energy monopoly Naftogaz.

Firtash denies the claims, saying that, in fact, it is the state that owes him money. A statement from Firtash’s Group DF said: “Arseniy Yatsenyuk has made a statement about the possible government expropriation of two Ostchem (Firtash’s chemicals business)companies. We believe this is provocative and designed to manipulate public opinion with an intention to redraw the market of mineral fertilizers.”

Narodny Front lawmakers then said that Russia’s state-owned First Channel has bought a 29 percent share of Firtash’s Inter TV channel. A spokesperson for Inter TV, who refused to give his name, said this had been a necessary step to protect Firtash’s assets from “political persecution.”

“The government wants to find a scapegoat for its failures,” Firtash said on Inter. “First, they blamed the war, and this was a very convenient excuse. When they saw that this strategy was no longer working, they started to fight against the so-called oligarchs.”

Yatsenyuk has also struck out against his political opponents, claiming that many are putting their personal popularity ahead of the national interest, according to a news conference he gave in Kyiv on June 22 following an official visit to the United States.

Most likely, Yatsenyuk’s party will take part in upcoming local elections scheduled for October in political tandem with President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc, according to political analyst Taras Berezovets.

But the Penta Center’s Fesenko disagrees, saying that Poroshenko would need to think carefully about allying himself with the unpopular prime minister.

More recently, Yatsenyuk came into conflict with Ecology Minister Igor Shevchenko, fired by Parliament on July 2, after accusing the prime minister of blocking economic reforms and running the government in a closed and controlling manner.

Yatsenyuk’s aim, Shevchenko said, is to install the prime minister’s loyalists in positions of power to advance their business interests. The prime minister’s press people did not respond to multiple inquiries seeking Yatsenyuk’s side of the story in his dispute with Shevchenko.