In a navy blue dress and her usual high heels, former prime minister and Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko spent more than two hours telling hundreds of her supporters that Ukraine’s political and economic system needs to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch.
“We will dismantle the entire old system, which doesn’t allow us to live properly,” she told the crowd of people who had turned up for her day-long forum at Kyiv Expo Plaza on Sept. 21.
Attendees listened to her with serious, but often perplexed faces.
It was odd to hear Tymoshenko, who for years has been basing her PR strategy on populist promises to raise salaries and cut utility tariffs, speaking about “innovations,” “big data” and “blockchain” instead of sounding her usual buzzwords “impoverishment” or “utility genocide.”
Tymoshenko has officially announced she will run for president in 2019.
But experts say that Tymoshenko, who has the highest presidential rating of about 20 percent according to a range of polls, has also a big problem. She has little appeal outside her usual electorate of predominantly middle-aged residents of small towns and villages.
So to attract new supporters from among the younger generation and from the big cities, she launched a rebranding of her political image this summer.
But now, with the mixed messages, she risks to lose her base, while failing to attract sufficient numbers of new supporters.
“You can’t say to businessmen: “I will decrease your taxes” and say to an old woman: “Don’t worry, the businessmen will pay for you tariffs,” Oleksiy Kovzhun, a political consultant, who worked with Tymoshenko in previous campaigns, said in a recent interview with news website Ukrainska Pravda.
Mocking Poroshenko
Tymoshenko started her speech by analyzing the 2020 strategy of reforms initiated by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in 2014.
Seen as overly optimistic even then, Poroshenko’s program soon proved to be unrealistic, which Tymoshenko happily pointed out.
“After I examined the economic prognoses of the president, I started liking weather forecasters. Because all the other forecasts look more true to me now,” she said.
Speaking in parliament a day earlier, Poroshenko had mocked Tymoshenko’s proposal for a parliamentary republic with chancellor as head of the government. Now Tymoshenko told her supporters: “It’s time to teach (Poroshenko) the right ideas.”
Tymoshenko also accused Poroshenko of “fake patriotism,” saying that overpriced weapons were being sold to the army, a massive amount of trade is still going on between Ukraine and Russian, and that Poroshenko himself owns a business in Russia and pays taxes there, which Poroshenko denies.
Poroshenko in turn regularly reminds Tymoshenko of the disadvantageous gas deals the then prime minister struck with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2009.
The rivalry between Poroshenko and Tymoshenko goes back to 2005, when both were in the team of then-President Viktor Yushchenko.
In the current presidential campaign, Poroshenko, who is yet to announce if he will run, setts out a conservative, nationalistic program, centered around the development of the army, national language, and faith.
In contrast, Tymoshenko is touting brand new trends and innovations. And she has already mastered the image.
Showing graphics on a large screen, Tymoshenko looked like a western lecturer or a TV host, rather than a post-Soviet businesswoman from 1990s who has spent more than 20 years in Ukrainian politics.
Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko walks to give a speech at a national forum ‘The New Course of Ukraine’ on Sept. 21 in Kyiv. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
New Constitution
Tymoshenko, who three times served in government, including twice as prime minister, now claims Ukraine’s constitution is dysfunctional. She said a new constitution needs to created by the people and adopted at a referendum.
Tymoshenko said Ukraine has to become a parliamentary republic with the more powers being granted to a chancellor than to the president. This would help to stop the competition for power between the president and prime minister and stop the “corrupt fights for (cash) flows” between them.
Critics, including Poroshenko, claim that with this system the chancellor would receive authoritarian powers.
Tymoshenko also proposes to implement public votes of confidence in top officials, who could then be ousted, and also have voters elect judges, as well as dismiss them through public “chambers of dignity.”
Tymoshenko said blockchain technology and electronic governance would be the way to destroy the current corrupt system of government, and that this would be more effective than the current plans to set up anti-corruption bodies.
Higher salaries, lower taxes
Tymoshenko said Ukraine’s economic and financial systems were based on business clans, and needed to be demolished.
Nevertheless, she herself earned millions via that same system when she headed the Energy Systems of Ukraine (YESU), gas trading company in the 1990s. She also oversaw the system when she was the vice-prime minister on energy and fuel in 1999-2001, and when she headed Ukraine’s government in 2005 and 2007-2010.
Tymoshenko next blamed the central bank, the National Bank of Ukraine, for allowing the fall of the national currency rate, saying that a fair rate should be about 11-13 hryvnias per U.S. dollar. She promised to launch criminal investigations against central bank officials if she comes to power, and to reopen small banks that were closed in recent years because of a lack of liquidity.
Tymoshenko claimed she would achieve the economic growth of a minimum of 7 percent per year by developing a “social market economy.”
She said the new economy would be based on the support of the middle class and the development of the innovations. To achieve this, her government would increase the salaries of the teachers and at the same time, it would decrease taxes.
She didn’t immediately explain how she would manage to simultaneously decrease taxes and increase budget spending.
She just wanted to appeal to both her old and new potential electorate. Time will show whether people believe her again.
