Ukraine Hits a Wall in Talks on Electoral Reform

Efforts to strengthen safeguards against fraud in a new Ukrainian presidential runoff election stalled in the parliament Tuesday in an atmosphere of intense distrust among competing factions.

Passage of electoral law revisions, particularly restrictions on absentee ballots, is seen as crucial to ensuring the legitimacy of the Dec. 26 rematch between opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.

Ukraine’s Supreme Court last week ruled that fraud had invalidated their Nov. 21 runoff election.

But pro-government parliament members have conditioned their support for anti-fraud legislation on Yushchenko’s camp agreeing to constitutional revisions that would shift many of the president’s powers to the prime minister.

Yushchenko has said he can agree to such reform, but only on a limited scale. He also wants the electoral changes approved first.

Tuesday’s bitter parliamentary debate focused on efforts to resolve this deadlock, with lawmakers trading allegations of bad faith. One of the key issues was how to structure a vote on the measures so that outgoing President Leonid D. Kuchma could not sign only those that he supports.

Yushchenko’s backers expressed fear that if they agreed to constitutional reforms as part of a deal to win the electoral safeguards, Kuchma might sign into law the reduced presidential powers but leave the election to be conducted without the anti-fraud safeguards.

“We don’t trust the president,” said Pavlo Kachur, an opposition lawmaker.

“He is the main obstacle to an agreement.”

Parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, a centrist who has tried to bring the two sides to an agreement, sought to finesse the dispute with a personal promise: “I will not sign and submit the constitutional amendments to the president until Kuchma signs the amendments to the election law,” he told lawmakers. “Is my word enough for you?”

Some opposition members, however, considered any compromise linking constitutional and electoral reforms a trap.

Yulia Tymoshenko, a key opposition leader who is one of Kuchma’s most scathing critics, charged that if the president and pro-government deputies won constitutional reform before the Dec. 26 balloting, Kuchma would then look for a way to cancel the runoff and hang on to power for months, until the reforms came into force.

Some critics suspect that Kuchma, who has been president for a decade and is extremely powerful under the current constitution, hopes that with a strong parliament and prime minister, he could still use his political skills and backroom influence to retain control after stepping down.

Kuchma met with leaders of parliamentary factions Tuesday morning before the full session got underway. At the meeting, he backed away from a statement he had read to reporters shortly after midnight Tuesday, after a six-hour “round table” negotiating session attended by European Union mediators and the two candidates. That statement said the parties had agreed, with some unspecified reservations, to the necessity for electoral reform.

Kuchma told the parliamentary meeting that no agreements had been reached, according to the presidential website.

The opposition has demanded that Kuchma dismiss Yanukovich as prime minister, in line with a recent parliamentary vote of no confidence.

Instead, Kuchma on Tuesday approved Yanukovich’s leave of absence during the rematch campaign and named a deputy prime minister as caretaker during that time.

Bargaining also got underway in parliament over the makeup of a new Central Election Commission to oversee the revote. Yanukovich had come out on top in the official tally for the Nov. 21 balloting, but Yushchenko claimed that those results were rigged and that he was the true winner.

For two weeks after that runoff, the opposition drew daily crowds of about 100,000 supporters in central Kiev to protest the results.

On Tuesday, with the key action taking place in parliament, there were far fewer demonstrators on the streets.

But thousands of Yushchenko supporters still spent the day in or around central Kiev’s Independence Square and an adjacent tent encampment, where they were awaiting further developments.

During the parliamentary session, backers of constitutional reform accused the opposition camp of being too power-hungry. Oleksandr Bondarchuk, a Communist, accused Yushchenko’s faction of wanting “a president with the powers of a czar, the kind of power the heads of banana republics always have.”