Ukraine is headed into a “grave political crisis” and parliament needs to revamp the coalition agreement and reshuffle the government, parliament speaker Volodymyr Groysman said during the opening of the Feb. 4 parliament session.
“It’s unacceptable to pretend that nothing is happening,” Groysman said. “We need to renew the government in line with a concrete action plan.”
Calls to draw up a new agreement for the four-party, pro-Western coalition with specific commitments to reform were renewed after the technocrat Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius announced his resignation on Feb. 3.
Abromavicius and his four deputy ministers announced plans to step down from their posts, citing resistance to systemic reforms and the lobbying for vested interests by the deputy head of the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, Ihor Kononenko.
The economy minister, who is of Lithuanian origin, took sick leave on Feb. 4 and didn’t appear at a meeting of the bloc, which nominated him to his post.
“The faction will not vote for the departure of Abromavicius until the whole government resigns,” said Yuriy Lutsenko, leader of the presidential faction.
After Feb. 16, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s government can be fired by parliament once their annual progress reports are presented.
Lutsenko said that Abromavicius’s move was a blow to Ukraine’s reform efforts.
He also said that Kononenko had demanded that the independent graft investigating body, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, probe the allegations made against him.
The third biggest pro-western coalition party, Batkivshchyna (Motherland), said it supported calls for a government reshuffle.
“It is impossible to reanimate and reform this government. It needs to resign,” Ivan Krulko said at a briefing in parliament. “Batkivshchyna believes that the government needs to be technocratic and made up of professionals, without party quotas (of ministers).”
Abromavicius is the third technocrat to announce he is quitting the government in less than two months after serving for just 10 months. Earlier, Infrastructure Minister Andriy Pyvovarskiy and Agriculture Minister Oleksiy Pavlenko had announced their resignations.
Shortly after Abromavicius announced he was quitting, ambassadors of the G7 nations, as well as from Sweden, Switzerland and Lithuania signed a statement expressing regret over the resignation and calling for Ukrainian politicians to give up selfish interests in favor of national interests.
President Petro Poroshenko in turn invited the G7 diplomats, including from the U.S., Germany and U.K., to a meeting on, Feb.4 in order to discuss issues related to the government and reforms in the country.
A fresh poll by the Rating sociological group shows that a mere 8 percent of Ukrainians are satisfied with the work of the government of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. The approval rating of President Poroshenko is at 21 percent, according to the poll.
Kyiv Post writer Olena Savchuk can be reached at [email protected]
