CIS

Home page

CIS

Ukraine Parliament Seals Prime Ministerâ€™s Ouster

03 March 2010 19:48 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The Parliament in Ukraine passed a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko on Wednesday, ousting the last of the Orange Revolution leaders from power but almost certainly not from politics, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€ newspaper.
The no-confidence vote was expected after Ms. Tymoshenko lost the presidential election last month, and after the speaker of Parliament said Tuesday the coalition that appointed her prime minister had broken up.
But she unexpectedly told Parliament she would resign if the vote passed, and her backers said she intended to move rapidly to lead the opposition against President Viktor F. Yanukovich, who was inaugurated last week.
Sergiy Terokhin, a former minister of economy and a member of Ms. Tymoshenkoâ€™s political party, said that after her ouster had become inevitable she decided to quickly thrust the burden of governance onto Mr. Yanukovich. He said the entire Cabinet would step down and appoint their deputies as acting ministers. Because the deputies were never confirmed by Parliament, they have fewer powers than acting ministers who remain after a vote of no confidence. The result, he said, would be to freeze major decisions in government until a new coalition is formed.
Another result will be to leave Mr. Yanukovich off balance in his first weeks as president as he is seeking to complete work on the already greatly delayed 2010 budget that can only be approved once a new government is in place. A budget, in turn, is needed to unlock International Monetary Fund lending to prop up the badly shaken economy.
Mr. Yanukovichâ€™s political party, the Party of Regions, banded together with other factions to pass the no-confidence vote with 243 votes in the 450-seat chamber. But they failed to muster the votes needed to form a new coalition, leaving some cards in Ms. Tymoshenkoâ€™s hands.
Members of several political parties in the faction of Viktor Yushchenko, Ms. Tymoshenkoâ€™s erstwhile ally in Ukraineâ€™s mercurial politics, voted for her dismissal. That factionâ€™s divided loyalties make it a crucial and unpredictable player in new coalition talks, even as Mr. Yushchenkoâ€™s political career is otherwise in decline. He failed even to make it into the second of the presidential electionâ€™s two rounds this winter.
If the Parliament is unable to form a coalition within 30 days, it will be disbanded and a new election called, prolonging the political season in Ukraine even as the country suffers acutely from the global recession.