EuroMaidan to decide whether opposition leader serves in new government

The members of the EuroMaidan protest will decide whether Arseniy Yatsenyuk should accept a proposal to become prime minister, said on Feb. 12 Oleksandr Turchynov, the first deputy chair of the Fatherland party, after the two party leaders met with imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in her penal colony. Yatsenyuk is the parliamentary faction chair of Fatherland.

The proposal is reportedly being offered by President Viktor Yanukovych and is being encouraged by the U.S. government in order to create a coalition government aimed at mitigating the political crisis.

In the phone call leaked on Feb. 6, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland stated that she supports Yatsenyuk becoming the next prime minister. In response, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt said he’d be working to ensure that such a coalition will stick.

Zenon Zawada: We admire the U.S. government’s efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, but we don’t see Yatsenyuk as prime minister as having many prospects in stabilizing the political situation. Instead, we predict in such a scenario that Yanukovych will dump all the nation’s enormous problems on Yatsenyuk ahead of the March 2015 presidential elections, in hopes of his failure. His campaign would then be based on blaming the opposition for undermining Ukraine’s stability with the EuroMaidan protest that led Russia to renege on its loans and natural gas price discounts.

Moreover, any attempt at painfully needed reforms that Yatsenyyuk might initiate will be undermined by the president and his allies in parliament. But we don’t see reason for him to worry. We predict the EuroMaidan will reject Yatsenyuk leading the next government, giving him the excuse to avoid what we can only describe as political suicide.