Crunch time for the Orange Revolution

When Ukrainians elect the 450 members of their country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, on 30 September, Western media will no doubt talk of a ‘landmark election’. But will the poll deliver the stability that has eluded Ukraine ever since the Orange Revolution of 2004 brought democracy to the country?

The Orange Revolution was touched off by systematic vote-rigging by the regime of former president Leonid Kuchma, who wanted then prime minister Viktor Yanukovich to succeed him. When then opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko won the poll instead, the government fiddled the results and declared Yanukovich the winner, prompting massive demonstrations that eventually forced the regime to cave in.

Today, following a Byzantine three-way power struggle between the two Viktors and Yushchenko’s erstwhile ally Yulia Tymoshenko, a charismatic former energy mogul, plus various complex realignments among the country’s powerful oligarchs, Yanukovich is back as prime minister under President Yushchenko.

Nobody, however, fears a re-run of the massive fraud of the Kuchma-era at the 30 September elections. Ukrainians may be disappointed with their leaders and the direction in which they have taken the country, but the rules of the game have changed fundamentally thanks to the revolution, according to one Ukraine watcher, who gives the example of a freer media.

Ukraine is the poster boy for the EU’s neighbourhood policy, which is designed to tie countries just outside the Union’s fringes to Brussels without actually offering the prospect of membership.

Some analysts suggest that this policy is fundamentally misguided and undercuts the EU’s ability to affect change in these countries. They say that keeping Ukraine within the strictures of the neighbourhood policy even after the Orange Revolution sent the signal to Ukrainians that despite their brave display of "people power", not much had changed as far as Brussels was concerned.

The EU is currently in the process of negotiating a new ‘enhanced agreement’ with Kiev, which is expected to create a free trade area, but talks are on ice because of the political crisis in the country.

But once concluded the deal is unlikely to change the basic dynamics of EU-Ukrainian relations. One EU diplomat said that while some countries, in particular Poland, supported eventual Ukrainian membership, nobody else in the EU was much interested in offering Ukraine such a prospect. Giving the country a membership perspective, however, is precisely what the European Parliament - in the words of a Brussels source, always ahead of the Council and the Commission in all matters Ukrainian - called for in a 12 July resolution.

Former Polish prime minister Jerzy Buzek, now an MEP, said that the July statement was very important but may have come too late. Buzek, who will be travelling to Ukraine as part of an election monitoring mission by the European Parliament, said that the EU "should have given such signals during the last two years".

The EU, meanwhile, is doing its best to underwrite reform in Ukraine with the tools currently at its disposal.

On the sidelines of an EU-Ukraine summit held in the Ukrainian capital on 14 September, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told Zerkalo Nedeli that a deepening of the Brussels-Kiev relationship "remains dependent on the quality of Ukraine’s democracy and reforms". The elections at the end of the month will provide an opportunity to assess that quality - and perhaps provide new urgency to calls from within the EU to change its approach to this pivotal country.

When Ukrainians elect the 450 members of their country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, on 30 September, Western media will no doubt talk of a ‘landmark election’. But will the poll deliver the stability that has eluded Ukraine ever since the Orange Revolution of 2004 brought democracy to the country?