CHORTKIV, Ternopil Oblast – A crowd in the small western Ukrainian city of Chortkiv quickly grows to around 2,000 people as Arseniy Yatseniuk appears on stage and addresses people with “blessed be the Lord,” a common local greeting. This is a large turnout for a city that has only 28,000 residents. And it turned out to be a fairly enthusiastic one as well.
People stood still, attentively listening to the 38-year-old politician, who is currently running for parliament on the party list of the imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party. With Tymoshenko jailed for more than a year, Yatseniuk is the de facto leader of the United Opposition.
“You must be tired of politics by now, but I ask you to listen to me about what we offer for the country,” Yatseniuk started off with voters on Oct. 23, five days before the Oct. 28 election.
Batkivshchyna is competing with another opposition party, Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, to be the second most popular party in the country, according to polls. There’s always been a lot of support for Tymoshenko and her party, mixed with contempt toward the current country’s leadership, in western Ukraine.
And now it’s left to Yatseniuk, the bespectacled, English-speaking former Verkhovna Rada speaker and former foreign minister, to fire up voters on the stump in place of the passionate Tymoshenko.
To do that, Yatseniuk had to reconcile with Tymoshenko and smooth over the bad feelings between the two former adversaries during their unsuccessful campaigns for president in 2010, a trophy won by Viktor Yanukovych.
“We were political rivals. Everyone wanted to win the presidential election (in 2010),” Yatseniuk explained in an interview with the Kyiv Post from the campaign trail in Ternopil Oblast. “Much has changed since then. Tymoshenko is in jail.”
He says that opposition parties realize that if they do not unite, they will lose the parliamentary election.
As a result, earlier this year Batkivshchyna and seven other opposition parties, including Yatseniuk’s Front of Changes Party, consolidated and composed a joint list of candidates for the parliamentary elections both for the party-list vote and for the single-mandate districts.
Separately, Batkivshchyna agreed with Oleh Tyahnybok’s nationalist Svoboda Party on common candidates in the single-mandate constituencies throughout Ukraine in order not to compete with each other.
Dressed casually in dark blue jeans and a short black leather jacket, Yatseniuk speaks in simple yet skillful language to rouse the crowd over their biggest concerns.
“I know there can be a better life and not like now, when half of Ternopil goes abroad [to work] and the other half stays here, jobless. Or it’s not your case?” asks the politician, waiting for the people’s response.
“True!” they answer affirmatively.
Yatseniuk said that Ukraine is rich in human and natural recourses, including its oil and gas that could be developed more. “Tomorrow will be better,” he shouted out, optimistically stressing each word and provoking another wave of applause.
Yatseniuk also won approval from the mostly elderly crowd when he said that, if opposition parties control the parliament, they’ll make Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov retire and force them to live on the minimum monthly pension of Hr 1,000 ($125). Many smile when Yatseniuk adds that Deputy Prime Minister Sergiy Tigipko can also retire in order to better test drive his pension cuts, which Yatseniuk promised to cancel once in power.
The speech made it clear that Yatseniuk has dropped his assertive and aggressive military-like rhetoric that was part of his failed 2010 presidential bid. Instead, he’s adopted more humor and colloquialisms in his public speeches.
“I cannot but remind you of Yanukovych, God bless him,” he said again, making people laugh before he started to criticize Ukraine’s current leadership that has cut government social expenditures and adopted unpopular measures such as raising the pension age.
“If they did not strip you of welfare, Yanukovych would have no money to fill up [the tank of] his helicopter,” Yatseniuk said.
Billboards with the Party of Regions and its candidates cannot be found in the city of Chortkiv and are quite rare on the road toward it. Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, as well as the Communists Party – which often appears to be in cahoots with the president’s party — are highly unpopular in western Ukraine. They pose no electoral threat to any of the opposition parties, but the western regions are also the most sparsely populated in the nation.
Passionate contempt for the current political elite is a mobilizing force here. “I know [that] nothing is easy, but I know what to do,” said Yatseniuk, outlining his political platform.
Besides cancelling the current pension cuts and tax code, seen as regressive by its critics, the Batkivshchyna Party wants to give voters greater control over their elected officials. Some of the measures include: impeachment, introducing criminal responsibility for voting in parliament with someone else’s electronic card and laws that make it possible for the people to recall lawmakers before the next regular elections, if these politicians switch sides or fail to deliver on their promises.
As far as economic policy goes, the opposition offers to cut and simplify taxes and crack down on offshore transfers of income. Closer relations with the European Union – signing an association agreement and winning visa-free travel – are Batkivshchyna’s foreign policy priorities.
Tymoshenko’s party won 156 seats in the 2007 parliamentary election, but the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko has dwindled to just under 100 members since then, with the exodus accelerating after Yanukovych won the presidency.
Yatseniuk said “we did everything we could” to prevent candidates on the opposition’s list from doing so again, including forcing them to take a public pledge to stay true to the faction.
If the polls are correct, the opposition forces combined are not likely to win enough seats in the 450-member legislature to override Yanukovych’s vetoes, so they will have to work with the president. But Yatseniuk thinks the opposition can force the president’s hand through laws raising pensions and stripping the president of his state-owned villas, including the multimillion-dollar Mezhyhirya estate.
“If Yanukovych vetoes these laws, his popularity will fall below zero,” he added firmly.
Yatseniuk spent only 40 minutes in Chortkiv before rushing off to two other rallies in the same day, a busy pace that he’s tried to keep up for the last two months.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]
