Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk reportedly have enough MPs to form coalition

The Petro Poroshenko Bloc and People’s Front led by PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk have cobbled together 230 MPs to form the new parliamentary coalition, said on April 7 Oleksandr Bryhynets, a Poroshenko Bloc MP. A coalition agreement should be signed on April 12 or 14, he said, as reported by the Ukrinform news agency. Bryhynets said a third parliamentary faction could join, which he hopes will be Self-Reliance, which is the third-largest. 

Zenon Zawada: We believe it’s more than 50 percent likely that a new parliamentary coalition between the factions of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk will emerge next week. At this point, it’s the president’s only political option that makes sense, from the point of view of maintaining the status quo, which is what he wants. This coalition is being formed by recruiting MPs who were independent or ejected from other factions.

Contrary to Bryhrynets’s expectation, we don’t expect any other faction to join this coalition because it would be political suicide to become associated with these failed political projects. Quite the contrary, we expect the other three pro-Western factions (Self-Reliance, Fatherland and Radical Party) will hammer the coalition hard on its ongoing resistance to reforms. And we believe early parliamentary elections in the fall are more than 50 percent likely.