Ukraine’s new President. After the party

Victor Yushchenko takes office - and chooses a controversial prime minister

HE HAD done it before, but this time it was for real. In November, after the presidential election was stolen by his opponent, Victor Yanukovich, in a rigged vote, Victor Yushchenko took a symbolic presidential oath in the Rada, Ukraine's parliament, while protesters chanted his name outside. The scene inside the Rada was only slightly more orderly on January 23rd, when he was officially sworn in. After a brief speech in parliament, the new president fittingly made another on Kiev's Independence Square, the heart of the insurrection that propelled him to victory.

Mr Yushchenko declared that Ukraine's future lay in a united Europe. Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign-policy honcho, had already dropped by (Colin Powell, America's outgoing secretary of state, was also in attendance). The new president then spent most of his first week in office travelling. In Strasbourg he bumped into Mikhail Saakashvili, who became president of Georgia after its “rose revolution” in 2003. Heady talk of an early application for EU membership has given way to more pedestrian offers of improved trade and visa rules. But before going west, Mr Yushchenko paid a quick call on the Kremlin - even though Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, had sent an insultingly low-level delegation to Kiev, and was far slower to congratulate Mr Yushchenko on his relatively clean win than he was to congratulate Mr Yanukovich in November.

The two presidents have much to discuss, including Ukraine's participation in a Russian-led single economic space and its aspirations to join NATO. This time, despite the Kremlin's brazen interference on Mr Yanukovich's behalf, Mr Yushchenko diplomatically extolled Russia as a “strategic partner”. This wary warmth was partly designed for internal consumption, in the Russian-speaking southern and eastern regions of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for his opponent.

But other political imperatives lay behind Mr Yushchenko's choice of prime minister. Jockeying among candidates had been intense, but Yulia Timoshenko - as reviled by some of Mr Yanukovich's supporters as she is adored by some of Mr Yushchenko's - insisted she would get the nod. She proved right. As chameleonic as she is glamorous, Mrs Timoshenko prospered as an energy-trading oligarch; was a deputy to Mr Yushchenko when he was prime minister; stands accused of fraud in Ukraine and of corruption by Russian prosecutors; and has reinvented herself as a revolutionary demagogue.

Mrs Timoshenko's appointment must be ratified by the Rada in early February. Though a heroine to the inhabitants of the tented city that sprang up in central Kiev after November's rigged poll, she has irked other elements within Mr Yushchenko's orange coalition. But a little mollification on her part, plus judicious distribution of remaining ministerial jobs, should see her though the vote and into power.

What would that mean for government policy? Mrs Timoshenko has been the most relentless critic of Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president, and his cronies. Mr Yushchenko has pledged to re-examine the old regime's most egregious abuses, not least its alleged role in his own poisoning, and its dodgiest privatisations; a Kiev court is hearing a challenge to one of the most scandalous. But here, too, a moderate beginning would be sensible.

Mrs Timoshenko was also against the constitutional reforms agreed with Mr Kuchma during the election crisis, under which many functions hitherto performed by the president are to be transferred to parliament (and thus to a future prime minister). There is now talk of revisiting that deal, too. But even though Mr Kuchma drove through the reform, it would be good for Ukraine. Having come to office as legitimately as, in the circumstances, he could, it would be a shame if Mr Yushchenko were now to cling on to powers that he had earlier agreed to relinquish.

Victor Yushchenko takes office - and chooses a controversial Prime Minister, Yulio Timoshenko.

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