Rada may be voting for land reform for two months, Arakhamia says

The process for approving the legislation launching the
farmland market could take another two months if lawmakers don’t speed up, in
the view of David Arakhamia, the head of The People’s Servant faction in the
Ukrainian parliament. “If we move with the same speed, then some time on April
16-17,” he told journalists on Feb. 7 regarding the expected timeline of its
approval. The Rada started reviewing the second reading of the draft law on the
land market on Feb. 6, upon which MPs submitted 4,018 amendments. The Rada
managed to review only 184 of them by Feb. 6, and 32 more by Feb. 7.

Alexander Paraschiy: The
submitting of thousands of amendments to any bill (many of them copying others,
and most of them having no chance of being voted upon) is a common trick used
by opponents to significantly prolong the process of a law’s adoption. In this
way, they are buying time to gain more media attention from their opposition to
such legal initiatives, earn some electoral dividends, as well as get some of
their positions reflected in the law. Or in the best case, they can persuade
individual MPs to vote against the law and kill the legislative initiative.
Needless to say, such long reviews weaken the government’s poll ratings,
especially if the initiatives are not very popular among the public.

Indeed at the current pace, the Rada will need
about 20 more session days to complete voting for the land reform, or by around
April 17. This pace does not look acceptable for the government which – besides
losing public support – is losing time for the adoption of other laws, 
particularly those essential for rebooting cooperation with the IMF (namely,
the long-anticipated bill that will prohibit the denationalization of
Privatbank). It will be apparent next week, when the Rada returns to work,
whether the pro-presidential ruling faction has a plan to accelerate the bill’s
passage.