Tymoshenko: idea of united opposition is great deception by Yanukovych

opposition today...

Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko believes it’s impossible to create “unnatural” unions of political parties, according to the Official website of Yulia Tymoshenko.

"We can’t bring Ukraine to deadlock. We already lived through this many times in 2005-2010. That’s why today we have no right to take a non-intellectual approach to political processes and the machine that in one way or another is forming the public consciousness," Yulia Tymoshenko told journalists of regional media today during a meeting of the "Na Vlasny Pohliad" media club.

Yulia Tymoshenko once again stressed that the authorities are imposing on society the idea of a "grand concept of uniting all the opposition." "This is a misleading idea that if the opposition unites it will win – this is deceit and delusion. The opposition today can’t be homogeneous because, first of all, it’s financed from different sources. Secondly, every opposition party has completely different goals and, thirdly, they all have different relations with the current government," she said.

"I do know that today there is a real opposition with which they’re competing like adults, and a comfortable opposition that is part of the government system keeping the clan system in place," she added.

Yulia Tymoshenko pointed out that in summer 2009 she tried to bring together different political parties in order to amend the constitution and switch to a parliamentary form of government. "I made an attempt, when it still wasn’t too late, knowing that the situation may develop as it has and knowing how difficult the situation may be in Ukraine, like it is right now," she explained.

"In summer 2009 I tried together with the Party of Regions to amend the Constitution to a purely parliamentary form of government. I believed that we didn’t have the right to risk it all with the country. And if there was even a slight chance that Yanukovych could become president, we should have all united and adopted changes to the constitution on a parliamentary form of government. Then the president would be like an English queen, while the parliament, which would have been selected based on a proportional system with open lists, could have become the driving force that would have at least been responsible to society," she said.

In her opinion, that was the chance Ukraine lost to switch to parliamentary democracy. "Right now we have unnatural unions, unacceptable ones because they have no logic, they can’t give rise to new contexts and they don’t form a way out of this situation," she said.

Yulia Tymoshenko believes the intellectual project that society can unite around should be a law on constitutional change. "As unpleasant and unpopular as it sounds, we must begin with serious changes to the Constitution of Ukraine. Today 90% of it consists of declarations that aren’t supported by any mechanisms, responsibility or active control, and only 10% are things that could work, but because of the impunity of policy and people in power, they simply don’t work," said Yulia Tymoshenko.