In the UK, parliamentary coalitions are normally formed like Mother Goose’s “House that Jack Built.” Any transparent process is a chain of comprehensible, cause-and-effect relations with a clear, simple, and explicable result because each character does his job and does it well. In Ukraine, it is like in Kornei Chukovsky’s nursery rhyme in which “kittens grunted and pigs meowed.”

After a fortnight recess over the Easter and May holidays, the chaotic motion in the labyrinth of different negotiating centers has resumed. Actually, each political force, except for the Communists, has several negotiating centers.

Our Ukraine (OU), for instance, has four centers: the president, who is its honorable leader, is negotiating with both Viktor Yanukovych and Rinat Akhmetov (via go-betweens). Prime Minister Yuri Yekhanurov is authorized to negotiate with all political forces that have entered parliament (although he has repeatedly denied his involvement, saying it is “the job of the people’s representatives”). The “official” negotiator is Roman Bezsmertny, whose name already makes the president mad. Every now and again Bezsmertny sails in the waterway of the fourth negotiating center – the president’s “dear friends” and then drifts aside.

What Yekhanurov is after is clear: he wants to be prime minister. According to our sources, one of the negotiating centers in the Party of Regions (PR) does not mind but insists that the president guarantee immunity of the businesses and territories controlled by PR tycoons. In exchange, Yushchenko is supposed to get guaranteed support in the 2009 presidential election. However, not all members of the party agree to such a scenario.

It would be good to know exactly what the president is after. On the one hand, Yushchenko wants to have a stable coalition and has every reason to suspect that the “orange” format can hardly be stable. On the other hand, he wants to stay in the game, albeit with narrower powers. Both the Party of Regions and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc offer him a hand, and he wavers as to which to accept. There is another dilemma: Yushchenko wants to see Yekhanurov at the post of prime minister and hates to see Tymoshenko there, but Western partners are outspokenly negative about an alliance with the Party of Regions. They are positive about Tymoshenko’s candidature for premiership as the only guarantor of Ukraine’s pro-Western political course and the only hope for a change in its gas policy. The latter circumstance is not to Yushchenko’s liking.

It looks like the president is not at all interested in a parliamentary coalition. The constitution gives him the right to dissolve the parliament unless a steady majority is formed within 60 days. For some reason he hopes that his political force will win a pre-term election. At present, he is trying to shed the heavy ballast of his so-called “dear friends” – big businessmen who helped him to the top but lost their influence on him last fall. He is looking for a new charismatic leader, making some anxious and bracing others for a new race.

Yushchenko has not seen his “dear friends” for weeks, except for Alexander Tretyakov, but he knows that they are still very influential in the party and its faction in the new parliament. Since Yushchenko has feeble influence and Yekhanurov has none at all, the “dear friends” are a strong negotiating center within Our Ukraine. According to our sources, representatives of business circles in the pro-presidential party were the first to contact the Party of Regions. But the PR leaders thought it better to negotiate with Yushchenko rather than his advisers. It became clear that the president was nudged to a decision that would rid him of both Tymoshenko and his “dear friends.”

The problem is that it is hard to persuade the rest of the OU faction to ally with the PR and to coerce the “dear friends” to vote for appointing Yekhanurov prime minister. Besides, according to the latest opinion polls, Yekhanurov’s popularity rating is rather low and the “orange electorate” is dead set against an alliance with the PR.

Under such circumstances, the president has two ways to go. One is to let the orange coalition emerge, to make an effort to help it work effectively, and then in six months or so to replace it with a “mixed” coalition. The other way is to remain aloof from the negotiating process and give informal consent to Tymoshenko’s premiership, leaving the rest up to his “dear friends,” who will never find a common language with Tymoshenko, wreck the coalition, and lead the situation to a logical result – a pre-term election.

The Party of Regions has several centers of influence, but this political corporation is sure to remain monolithic at least for the next few months, despite certain centrifugal tendencies. Viktor Yanukovych seems to have given up on his hopes to be the next prime minister. Yes, he is still the leader of the party, but this status only entitles him to a negotiator’s badge. At the same time, a number of influential members are aware that his position tends to grow weaker. They dislike his aplomb. The most stable figure in the party is Rinat Akhmetov. He stays out of talks. He meets only with the select. He never makes a big point of his desire to come to power right now. He is ready to wait a few months till power falls into his hands.

Akhmetov does not rule out an alliance with Tymoshenko. He has repeatedly said that he does not “bear a grudge against her” (because she took the Kryvorizhstal steel works away from Pinchuk and Kuchma, not him). One of the most influential members of the Party of Regions told The ZN, “It would be better for us to stop wasting time with this president and agree with Tymoshenko, but she wouldn’t.”

The third negotiating center in the PR is Andrei Klyuyev – its influential minority stakeholder. He meets with Yekhanurov, and the next day Yekhanurov probes for appointing him Naftogaz president. He sees Presidential Secretariat officials, and the next day we hear new statements about the need to form a “broad coalition.” Tymoshenko met with him after her bloc failed to gain the majority in the district councils of Kyiv, but got no result.

As far as Yulia Tymoshenko is concerned, her biggest problem is obviously her bloc’s motley membership. In many of the newly elected local self-governments, her bloc’s factions are already falling apart. If she does not become prime minister, then the lenders, who bought seats in local councils with donations to her election campaign, may not feel bound by any obligations to her political force. Moreover, the Tymoshenko faction in the parliament may shrink because there are too many members who do not want to lose their profits or even their businesses due to the faction’s opposition status. Of course, they are not afraid of Yushchenko, but they know that once the Party of Regions comes to power, it is sure to avail itself of every opportunity. Some of them are already making friends with members of the PR camp.

Tymoshenko is often at variance with her closest comrades (Brodsky, Turchinov, et al) over the strategy and tactics of negotiations. No one has managed to convince Tymoshenko that she should negotiate with Our Ukraine. She is still convinced that once she has reached agreement with Yushchenko, the OU faction will automatically vote for her appointment to prime minister. She seems to forget her own words about “a group of dear friends controlling Our Ukraine.”

Tymoshenko surely understands that, even if she makes a comeback to the top place in the government, she might lose it together with her MP mandate. She understands that she will hardly be able to carry through on her plans, knowing that the other partners see no difference between “control” and “spokes in wheels.”

So why is she still striving for premiership? Why does she reject an alliance with the Party of Regions that would secure a steady majority and untie her hands? The answer is simple: between power and electoral support, Tymoshenko chooses the latter. She can not give up on her premiership, which was the motto and gist of her election campaign. But she cannot ally with the Party of Regions, either, because her voters would never forgive her such an alliance. She is ready to stay at the premier’s post for a short time. She is ready to be in the opposition. She is ready to see her bloc’s factions in all representative bodies fall apart. But she is not ready to take any step that would lower her popularity rating, because her prime target is the top position in the state – the constitutional title does not matter.

As to the Socialists, their leader Oleksandr Moroz has never concealed his ambition to become the parliamentary speaker, and Tymoshenko has always supported it, trying to tie his political force to the orange coalition. Because of her categorical position “Tymoshenko the premier – Moroz the speaker,” the newly elected parliament still has no one to preside at the opening session.

The Socialists are not happy to trade several important executive posts for the speaker’s seat, and the rift between the Socialist Party’s business and ideological wings is growing deeper: one is set to ally with the Party of Regions, while the other sees no other perspective but an orange coalition. Moreover, there are different and often conflicting personal ambitions within the Socialist Party.

A question arises: how can this disjointed group of political leaders form a stable and responsible coalition and, subsequently, a government that is supposed to launch reforms and secure rapid economic development?

There is only one more or less efficacious body in this country at present: the working group that is drafting the future orange coalition’s action program. The authors can hardly be expected to produce a perfect document, but some parts of it are very likely to be sensible. Naturally, due to ideological contradictions with the Socialists, the key strategic provisions will be unfeasible. The question is how far the Socialists are ready to go to meet their allies halfway in exchange for important executive positions.

It is absolutely clear that many political leaders in this country are disinterested in any coalition at all. And those who are interested in it (above all, the newly elected MPs), have to decide which figure is the ultimate decision-maker in the coalition’s formation – the president or the lawmakers. According to Tymoshenko’s plan, it is the president. According to the plan that is being drafted jointly by the Tymoshenko Bloc, the Socialists, and a part of Our Ukraine, it is the parliament. In a word, the coalition is going to be built either constitutionally (from bottom to top) or traditionally (from top to bottom).

Yushchenko is rumored to have told his close entourage that he gave Tymoshenko the green light to start consultations on forming the coalition government. But even if the rumor proves true, this fact is meaningless because it is impossible to order the people who control Our Ukraine to accept Tymoshenko’s staffing proposals. The president may count on this very obstacle: he would thus conserve the orange image and open the way to a coalition with the PR, if not to a pre-term election.

Is there a way around this obstacle – the conflict between Tymoshenko and Yushchenko’s “dear friends”? In theory, yes, and it is called “the coalition memorandum,” the document that was adjusted and agreed upon by the three orange political forces prior to the March 26 elections. After the elections, it was signed by Moroz and Tymoshenko. It provides for a quota-based distribution of posts among the allies and directly rules out the right to veto any candidature to be nominated by any of the allies within its quota. It means that if Our Ukraine nominates Candidate A for the position of parliamentary speaker, then the Tymoshenko Bloc and the Socialists have no right to veto that candidate and are bound to vote for him. If the Tymoshenko Bloc proposes Candidate B for the post of justice minister and the Socialists propose Candidate C for the post of National Bank governor, this rule applies, too.

Undoubtedly, such a detour cannot ensure a consistent and rational staff policy in the executive or legislative branches. On the other hand, this approach is a way to peacefully satisfy the allies’ ambitions.

The problem is that the authors of the memorandum go as far as to overlap the presidential competence. But if the lawmakers manage to form a coalition in compliance with constitutional norms, they would find a way out of this deadlock and put an end to this Brownian permissiveness which, as we know from history, has always been cut short by a strong hand.