People invested high hopes in Yuriy Lutsenko, but he let them down.
Yuriy Lutsenko “has always been a showman” whose performance as the nation’s interior minister will be best remembered for his volatile behavior than for any lasting achievements, Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kyiv political analyst, said.
“The results of his work are not high,” said Victor Chumak, another political analyst, of Lutsenko’s job in leading the nation’s 324,400 police officers. “We expected Lutsenko to change relations between police and citizens, with law enforcement protecting citizens’ rights and freedoms. But law enforcement remained institution protecting rights of small group of politicians and businessmen.”
Aside from the May 4 incident in Germany, Lutsenko last year struck Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky after an argument at a National Security and Defense Council, during which Chernovetsky accused Lutsenko of ordering police to crack down on the mayor’s business interests. Lutsenko explained his violent reaction by saying his “personal honor had been insulted.”
Lutsenko also was accused of making a number of racist statements last summer in trying to halt the influx of migrant workers from China and other Asian nations.
In September 2005, before a Cabinet of Ministers meeting, Lutsenko handed out Easter eggs as a way of egging on a rival, Party of Regions leader Victor Yanukovych, who was mocked for dramatically falling to the pavement and clutching his chest in agony after someone tossed an egg at him during a 2004 presidential campaign stop in Ivano-Frankivsk.
But the May 4 airport incident in Frankfurt, in which Lutsenko was allegedly drunk and combative, allowed his numerous critics to strike back. The largest faction in parliament, the Regions Party, called for parliament to immediately accept Lutsenko’s resignation. “Yura, sober up,” read one poster in parliament.
“It’s awful when a minister is seen as a clown, a drunk clown furthermore,” said Anna Herman, a Regions Party leader in parliament. “I remember him as PR man calling in politicians for questioning on TV and opening criminal cases against them which later turn out to be fabricated. I don’t remember him as minister who worked better than others.”
Shortly after his first appointment in 2005, Lutsenko initiated a criminal case against Borys Kolesnikov, a Party of Regions lawmaker and 2004 Orange Revolution opponent, for alleged extortion. Kolesnikov spent several months in jail before the case was abruptly closed.
And President Victor Yushchenko, who has become politically estranged from his one-time ally, criticized the interior minister’s behavior. “The incident harmed reputation of the country, the government and the minister,” Yushchenko said.
It all adds up to a politician who may have not enough allies to cushion his fall from power – although parliament as of May 14 had not voted to accept Lutsenko’s resignation. “If Lutsenko paid more attention to legal aspects of cases and not to public relations issues” and fighting with political opponents, Fesenko said, he would have been more successful.
Analysts say that if parliament rejects his resignation, Lutsenko survival will owe more to the desire of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and others to not upset the delicate political status quo. “It would be better for Tymoshenko to have a bad but loyal minister and control the ministry before the presidential election,” Fesenko said.
Lutsenko’s supporters say that one of his accomplishments was increasing fines for traffic violations, credited with making the roads safer. He also presided over a decline in homicides.
But, despite Lutsenko’s grand promises during the 2004 Orange Revolution, numerous high-profile crimes remain unsolved. The people who ordered journalist Georgiy Gongadze’s beheading and murder in 2000 are still free. Those who poisoned Yushchenko with dioxin have gone unpunished.
And most Ukrainians, according to a recent Razumkov Center poll, expressed lack of confidence in the police.
