SURPRISES? (Sorprese?)

The presidential election campaign in Ukraine has two main intrigues, if anything extraordinary does not happen in the New Year and Christmas holidays. The first one is a very wide gap between approval ratings of the leaders of the presidential race, Viktor Yanukovych and Yuliya Tymoshenko. When the campaign started, many people said that in the first round Viktor Yanukovych would take 2-5% votes more than Yuliya Tymoshenko would. But according to the recent public opinion polls, the gap has become twice as wide as it was, and now it is about 10%.

Why did this occur? The main reason is a failure of the Cabinet’s budget policy. Ms Tymoshenko hoped to take foreign credits from, in the main, the International

Monetary Fund for a year. The IMF divided the credit up into four tranches. It has issued three tranches, but all of them, in spite of the original agreements, were used for social spending, in other words, “to bribe the voters”. The IMF turned a blind eye to that, but it did not give the fourth tranche suspecting the government not only of spending the money on the social payments but also

of corruption.

Now Yuliya Tymoshenko can indemnify for the budget neither through the domestic incomes nor through the credits. Like in corrida, the moment of truth came, the viewers, the bull and the toreador understand everything. In the case of Yuliya Tymoshenko, the situation is understandable to the political elite, international organizations and Ukraine’s people.

For the first time, there are no Christmas trees in many towns and villages, and the people have too little money to give presents to their children. This did not happen in Ukraine even in hard times. Earlier the government was not ready to fight against the flu, even gauze face-bandages and the cheapest drugs were not sold in the drugstores.

Given the current situation, it is unclear how Yuliya Tymoshenko is going to bridge the gap between herself and Viktor Yanukovych. She has only three weeks (as a matter of fact, only one week because of the holidays) to do that. So, I believe that in the main she will dig up the dirt on her rival even if the dirt is not true at all.

At the beginning of the campaign everybody was sure that Arseniy Yatsenuk would rank third, which would allow him to claim to become Prime Minister. And the second intrigue is that today Serhyi Tigipko ranks third, which I am glad to hear. Probably I am the only person who said that this presidential candidate was very up-and-coming politician. Then his approval rating was about 2% and has reached 9% by now. Serhyi Tigipko has created a good basis to fill a high position after the elections, or to take part in early parliamentary elections with forming his own faction.

Why did Serhyi Tigipko come to rank third? The Ukrainian people do not trust the authorities. Only 3% of the population trust the Parliament. Many presidential candidates are the MPs including Arseniy Yatsenuk. For the recent five years Serhyi Tigipko has been neither MP nor held any high posts. Unlike the other second echelon candidates he is not associated with the current authorities, who have discredited themselves.

(Eurasian Home)