TWO hours after the polls closed in Ukraine's election on September 30th the opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, strode into a private suite in Kiev's smartest hotel, where European observers were waiting. At that moment Viktor Yanukovich, the incumbent prime minister, appeared on television looking shell-shocked. The exit polls were still coming in, but the first results were reflected on the politicians' faces. «We have the right to form the new government,» Mr Yanukovich bleated. «Oh dear,» said Ms Tymoshenko, before switching off the television, «he does look like an upset child.»
Days later Mr Yanukovich had bounced back. His Party of the Regions took the biggest share of the vote, as it had in March 2006. But the momentum is still running Ms Tymoshenko's way. She is the only politician whose popularity has risen sharply, boosting her party's share of the vote from 22% 18 months ago to almost 31%. With Our Ukraine, the party of President Viktor Yushchenko, taking 14%, there is a tiny majority for an «orange» coalition with Ms Tymoshenko as the most likely prime minister.
Forming that government depends on Ms Tymoshenko and Mr Yushchenko sticking together. On October 3rd Mr Yushchenko called on all three parties to start talks over a coalition. But Ms Tymoshenko promptly said she could not work with Mr Yanukovich, as did some members of Our Ukraine.
The voters' strong support for Ms Tymoshenko suggests that, for all their disillusionment in the past few years, they want reform just as much as they did when they poured into Kiev's Independence Square in the snows of late 2004. The orange revolution that pushed Mr Yushchenko into the presidency instead of Mr Yanukovich turned Ukraine from a corrupt post-Soviet autocracy into a fragile democracy. That Mr Yushchenko's support is now relatively weak reflects not a change of mood but his failure to live up to the orange revolution's promises.
The latest election has restored the divide between the Party of the Regions and the orange coalition. This same line separates a post-Soviet thuggish political culture from a proto-European one. If Mr Yushchenko tries to blur the line by working with Mr Yanukovich, as he did in 2006, he is likely to land the country in a new political crisis.
For all the faults that became evident when she was briefly prime minister in 2005, Ms Tymoshenko has remained consistent. Unlike Mr Yushchenko, she has always rejected the idea of forming a coalition with her opponents. Unlike Mr Yanukovich, she has not tried to change her image with the help of American spin-doctors. In the eyes of millions of Ukrainians, she is still the blonde heroine of the orange revolution and a victim of, not a participant in, the infighting among the president's men.
She promises a break with the past that appeals to those who feel let down by successive governments. And she has broad support. Mr Yushchenko draws his vote largely from the west of Ukraine, and Mr Yanukovich from the Russian-speaking east and south. Ms Tymoshenko is less territorial: most of her voters live in central Ukraine, but in this election she has made inroads in both east and west. The risk of Ukraine splitting down the River Dnieper was always overdone. After this election it looks smaller still.
Ms Tymoshenko avoids the sensitive issue of making Russian a second official language and no longer pushes for early entry into NATO, opposed by the south and east. Like most of her countrymen, she believes that the future of Ukraine lies in the European Union. But, claims Hryhory Nemyria, her chief adviser, there is a distinction. She does not see membership as a reward to be handed out merely for breaking out of the post-Soviet space, or as a source of quick economic goodies. «To her, being part of Europe means modernising Ukraine first,» he says. «We can only come as close to the EU as we are ready.»
She also promises to clean up chronic corruption and sever the links between business and politics. (Each party in Ukraine is backed by powerful business interests, including her own.) Having made her fortune in murky gas trades between Russia and Ukraine in the early 1990s, Ms Tymoshenko now says she will eliminate all shady intermediaries and make the gas trade transparent. As soon as she emerged as a potential winner this week, Gazprom, Russia's gas giant, started growling about the $1.3 billion of debt Ukraine owes for gas and threatened to cut off supplies, just as it did in January 2006.
Ms Tymoshenko is the most professional politician in Ukraine, but also the most populist. She has promised within two years to reimburse the savings people lost when the Soviet Union collapsed—a pledge even her advisers say is unrealistic. Her period as prime minister in 2005 was marked by talk of reviewing privatisation deals and capping fuel prices. But she has learnt lessons, says Mr Nemyria, and is now more pragmatic. Whatever she does, though, she will be held accountable by those who voted for her, because Ukraine has since 2004 become a recognisable democracy in which power is granted and taken away on the basis of elections that are broadly free and fair.
That is the biggest achievement of all by this former Soviet republic, and it is appreciated by losers as well as winners. As Yuri Miroshnychenko, a young member of the Party of the Regions, puts it: «There is no absolute power in Ukraine. We can work in opposition and her coming to power is not a tragedy for us. The most important thing is that Ukraine is moving in the right direction. Today it is becoming Europe. There is no way back.»
"The Economist"
