Ukrainiana

New NUNS on the Block/Run

Some spiders eat their mother when they hatch. It doesn’t take an arachnologist to detect this modus vivendi in Ukrainian politics.

Last year, Ukraine witnessed a para-democratic phenomenon called party shopping — the practice of MPs teleporting themselves from Party A to Party B after the election, not without certain materialistic inducements. Bottom line: dissolution of the Verkhovna Rada; a snap election.

This year, we're witnessing an innovative development that can be termed as post-election party building. Objective:

1. Creatively destroy the Orange Coalition;

2. Secure, through skillful ideological maneuvering and oligarch-poaching, the re-election of President Yushchenko.

At least, that’s what it looks like.

On Thursday, the six NUNS MPs who had left NUNS a few weeks ago, without relinquishing their parliamentary seats, formed the nucleus of a party called Yedyny Tsentr (United Center).

Initially branded as Hart (Ukr. quenching, hardening, tenacity, etc), the party has rebranded to a more clear-cut identity, presumably acting on communications advice.

Some analysts believe that the real leader, the mastermind who unites the six NUNS in their tenacity, is Viktor Baloha, chief of the Presidential Secretariat. (The formal party boss is MP Ihor Kril.)

One can view Yedyny Tsentr as a political escape pod in the utopian goal of rebranding Yushchenko as the nation’s leader, with the moral glue to bridge the rift between the east and the west. In the real word, if anyone could re-slice and splice the electoral pie, Yushchenko would be the wrong guy for the job.

Like an insect caught in a spider web, Yushchenko doesn’t even seem to flap his wings anymore, his Orangeness sucked out of him. To the vast majority of his 2004 voters, the man is a shadow of his former self. He drones stabilnist time and again. But that hardly makes him more appealing to easterners, who largely vote against him.

When one’s need for a genuine rebirth takes a back seat to one's re-election drive, strange things happen. Justice Stanik, whom President Yushchenko fired last May for “breach of oath,” amid accusations of bribery, has been reinstated. That about wraps it up for “one law for all.”

One should keep in mind that some female spiders devour their male mates once they’re done mating. But that’s another success story, that is, the story of another, more powerful female waiting to happen.