Ukrainian Protesters See Too Many Familiar Faces in Parliament After Revolution
All the same, the site [sic] of luxury cars dropping off members of Parliament at the colonnaded legislature building, is now guarded by “self-defense” units that previously battled government forces, has stirred dismay and anger.
“Again we see Mercedes and BMWs bringing deputies who are supposed to represent the people,” said Mr. Kuak, “We don’t want to see these people again. We want to see people from the square, from the revolution.”
But as with any revolution, the question of who should represent the turbulent forces that created it is a difficult one. The revered heroes of Ukraine’s revolution are squads of helmeted young men with clubs who risked their lives to hold back government forces as they tried early last week to seize Independence Square, known as Maidan. The center of Kiev is now scattered with shrines to those who died, each one piled with flowers left by grateful residents.
"Ukraine is game to you?"
“We need people from Maidan, not people like you,” screamed an angry woman as Volodymyr Lytvyn, a former speaker of the Parliament known for shifting with the wind, left the legislature building. As he tried to answer questions from the crowd, protected by two bodyguards and a solid wrought iron fence, a cry went up clamoring for “lustration of everybody,” a term usually associated with the purge of officials and politicians suspected of serving Communist regimes before the revolutions of 1989 across Eastern and Central Europe.
Peppered with angry demands that the Parliament raise pensions, reopen closed hospitals and find work for the jobless
I am not sure how popular the West's usual IMF austerity plan is going to play.
, Mr. Lytvyn struggled to respond but basically called for patience, a virtue that is likely to be in short supply if the interim government does not manage to convince people it is working to improve their lives, not line its own pockets.
Mr. Turchynov, the speaker and effectively Ukraine’s new president until elections, gets credit for swiftly shepherding a raft of legislation through Parliament to establish the legal basis for a post-Yanukovych order. But few see him as representing the revolution.
“He knows parliamentary routines but he does not have the support of the people,” said Nikita Kornavalov, a teacher, 29, who left a job in Norway to support what he hopes will be a new era free of the corruption and brutality that have marred the country since its independence in 1991.
But even those who want a decisive break with a political class seen as corrupt and self-serving acknowledge that the heroes of the street might not make the best rulers. One of the most prominent leaders of the street forces is Dymtro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector, a coalition of previously fringe nationalist groups. But his elevation to government would terrify many Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and accelerate the risk of a dangerous break-up.
“Yarosh would be good in the stage security service or the police, but not as a minister,” said Ms. Nikanchuk, the economist.
