Tymoshenko as a dictator

Ukraine is in a fever again - this time the Verkhovna Rada voted to limit the powers of the president, as a result of which the coalition between the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT) and the Our Ukraine - People's Self-Defense (NU-NS) faction collapsed.

Yushchenko, part of whose powers, according to the bill adopted at the evening meeting of the Rada on September 2, is now transferred to Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said in a televised speech on September 3 that a coup d'etat had been carried out in the country. According to him, BYuT has now united with the communists and the Party of Regions of Viktor Yanukovych (it was these factions that voted as a whole for the “anti-Yushchenko” bill). “The Democratic majority has been betrayed by this union,” he said. Yushchenko threatened to dissolve parliament and veto the adopted law.

In response, BYuT accused Yushchenko of treason and said that the president’s statements were an “adventurist lie.” A statement on the bloc’s website says that the president “has already betrayed the Democratic Coalition twice: in 2005, when he dismissed the government of Yulia Tymoshenko, and now, he began to destroy the Democratic Coalition almost from the first minutes of its creation.”

The law, which Yushchenko called unconstitutional and establishing the dictatorship of the prime minister, suggests that the head of government may have the right to conduct international negotiations and conclude agreements without being guided by the president’s acts. In addition, the Cabinet of Ministers is no longer obliged to execute acts of the president and respond to his appeals; the law does not speak of the possibility for the president or his representative to take part in government meetings, but, on the contrary, states the impossibility of persons authorized by the president to take part in meetings of government committees . Moreover, the impeachment procedure has been simplified.

The pro-presidential bloc NU-NS left the Rada meeting room in protest (Speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk left the room even earlier), and then the coalition with BYuT. At the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers on September 3, all ministers from the NU-NS were absent, except for the Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko, the leader of the People's Self-Defense, who, unlike his comrades-in-arms, is convinced that Yushchenko and Tymoshenko will make peace. By the way, People's Self-Defense opposed the collapse of the coalition.