Tymoshenko, Yushchenko, and Yanukovych were once called the “eternal triangle” of Ukrainian politics, but eternity is not what it used to be. One side of the triangle has disappeared.
Five years ago, when the “Orange Revolution” turned Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko into democratic heroes, the villain of the piece was Viktor Yanukovych, the former Communist apparatchik who tried to steal the 2004 election. But Yushchenko was a very weak president except in one area: his obsessive feud with his former ally, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which all but paralysed the government of Ukraine for five wasted years.
It’s likely that she bears as much of the responsibility as he does for this disastrous clash of personalities, but she is a much more vivid personality and an adroit politician, so the public blamed Yushchenko. Now he has lost the presidency in the most humiliating manner imaginable.
In complete denial about his loss of public support, Yushchenko insisted on running again in the presidential election on Jan. 17 — and got only five per cent of the vote. It is “Yulia” (as she is known to everyone in Ukraine) who will slug it out with her old enemy Viktor Yanukovych in the second round of voting on Feb. 7.
Last time round, this was a confrontation that seemed to matter. It was a great story: the young democratic heroine Tymoshenko in her trademark braid, committed to modernizing Ukraine and bringing it into the European Union and the NATO military alliance, versus the corrupt and colourless Yanukovych, who wanted to drag Ukraine back into collectivist poverty and political subjugation to Russia. But things look different this time.
The greatest difference is that there no longer seems to be such a difference between their policies. It’s now clear that Ukraine will never join NATO: the alliance does not seek a confrontation with Russia, and only 20 per cent of Ukrainians would support membership in NATO anyway.
It’s also obvious that the European Union does not want to expand this far east. It is already suffering severe indigestion from its last round of expansion in Eastern Europe, and taking in an even poorer country with a population of 46 million people would not rank very high on the EU’s list of priorities even if Brussels were not also reluctant to annoy Russia. So Tymoshenko and Yanukovych no longer have much to disagree about in foreign policy.
Whether Yanukovych or Tymoshenko wins hardly matters economically. Only massive loans from the International Monetary Fund are keeping the economy afloat at the moment, and for some time to come it will be the IMF, not the new government, that makes the key economic decisions. So what’s left? Well, they could fight over national identity.
The west of the country is Ukrainian-speaking, and deeply nationalistic; the east is mostly Russian-speaking, heavily industrialized, and would welcome closer ties with Russia. So this is the ground on which the two leading presidential candidates have chosen to fight, with Tymoshenko promising to keep Ukrainian as the sole official language and Yanukovych promising equal status for the Russian language.
Given the demography of Ukraine, this means that Tymoshenko will win the presidency in the second round of voting. But who cares, apart from Ukrainians?
With so little room for manoeuvre abroad, and such rampant corruption at home, Ukrainians have grown very cynical about democracy. Indeed, a recent poll disclosed that only 30 per cent of Ukrainians think that the change to democracy has been good for their country, whereas 50 per cent of Russians think so.
And only 26 per cent of Ukrainians say that they are satisfied with their lives. Democracy does not heal all wounds.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.