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Street fighter Yanukovich seeks Orange revenge

Posted on: Thu February 04, 2010

It was deep in this industrial region of smokestacks and slag heaps in eastern Ukraine that the frontrunner in Ukraine presidential elections received his political and personal education.

Orphaned at the age of two, Viktor Yanukovich ran around the streets bare-footed as his family struggled to make ends meet in a childhood of abject poverty that turned him into a seasoned political street fighter.

Now 59 and at the top of national politics for almost a decade, Yanukovich is the favourite to win the battle to become Ukraine s next president and avenge his humiliation in the 2004 Orange Revolution. When Ukraine ousted its old order in the Revolution, Yanukovich was cast in the West as the villain, a scheming servant of Russia who rigged an election.

Yanukovich pipped pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko in the run-off of presidential polls, only to find the result overturned by the supreme court after tens of thousands took to the streets in the Orange uprising. The supreme court found mass vote-rigging and ordered a re-run which was won by Yushchenko.

But rather than retreating to the shadows, Yanukovich sharpened his image and sought to soften his pro-Russia rhetoric with help from United States image-makers including top consultant Paul Manafort.

He will never be known as a great speaker and his verbal fumbles in both Russian and his somewhat halting Ukrainian are the object of amusement amongst critics, who also note he never adequately explained the rigging accusations.

But for his supporters, Yanukovich is the champion of working class Ukrainians especially in the Russified east of the country who felt left out amid the nationalism of the Orange Revolution. The economic crisis and political chaos engulfing Ukraine played into his hands and in the first round of voting last month Yanukovich was 10 per cent ahead of his run-off rival Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Not that Yanukovich who counts tennis and pigeon-fancying as amongst his spare time interests is any stranger to comebacks in life.

In the late 1960s under the Soviet Union he fell in with a local street gang and was convicted of robbery in 1967 and assault in 1970, serving time in prison on both occasions.

The convictions were then erased in December 1978 but had repeatedly been brought up by his opponents in the campaign. Yanukovich worked for two decades as a regional transport executive in Donetsk before moving into local politics in the late 1990s, local governor in 1997 and rising to prime minister under president Leonid Kuchma in 2002.

In building the Regions Party into a major political force, he enjoyed the financial support of one of Ukraine s richest oligarchs, the metals and mining magnate Rinat Akhmetov, who also owns 2009 UEFA Cup winner Shakhtar Donetsk.

Yanukovich still draws the bulk of his support from the Donetsk region and eastern Ukraine, where Russian rather than Ukrainian is the language of daily life.

But he has also sought to enhance his appeal in the more nationalist western Ukraine and analysts say Yanukovich s performance here will be crucial in determining the outcome of the run-off.

Courtesy : The News