Rada speaker, vice-speaker resign

Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and Vice-Speaker Mykola Tomenko both offered their resignations yesterday morning, sparking a scramble between political parties against the regional languages legislation approved by the Rada a day earlier. Lytvyn’s signature is required on the bill before it can be sent to the president. President Viktor Yanukovych already mentioned the option of an early parliamentary election to resolve the deadlock, but said he hoped first to exhaust other options via talks between political parties would succeed (a parliamentary election is already scheduled for October 28).

Brad Wells: The law on regional languages is the most controversial piece of legislation in the last two years and has prompted widespread protests, mostly from the Ukrainian-speaking population, which fear it will stifle advances the Ukrainian language has made since the country’s independence. Yanukovych’s Party of Regions looks favorably positioned at this point in the new format for running parliamentary elections, with 50% of seats allocated from constituencies as its power base is located in Ukraine’s most populated regions. Thus, it might not have much to lose from a “last resort” option of a pre-term election. We expect the opposition to attempt to exploit the strong-arm methods used to pass the language bill and lack of debate on it before passage to mobilize voters – and it grow into the sort of unifying issue that it has been missing.