Oct 4, 2007, 15:13 GMT
Kiev - Senior officials from Ukraine's leading pro-West political parties on Thursday rejected calls to form a grand coalition in the next parliament, saying the next legislature's ruling majority should exclude the country's main pro-Russia party.
Parliamentary elections held in the former Soviet republic on Sunday gave the pro-Russia Regions Ukraine party 34.36 per cent of the popular vote; but the anti-corruption Block of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT) and Our Ukraine - National Self-Defence (OUNSD) obtained 30.72 per cent and 14.16 per cent respectively - enough for the two to form a narrow majority in the legislature.
Two smaller parties, the Communists (5.39 per cent) and a block led by former parliament speaker Volodymyr Litvin (3.96 per cent), also will have a small number of seats in parliament. Almost all - 99.96 per cent - of the election's ballots had been counted by Thursday afternoon.
Yury Lutsenko, OUNSD's leader, at a Kiev press conference said his party and BYuT would begin formal coalition talks on Friday, and that inclusion of the pro-Russia Regions in the future government was extremely unlikely.
'We can have talks with them, and discuss common agenda, but we do not see them (Regions) in the ruling coalition,' Lutsenko said.
Inclusion of the Litvin party was however 'certainly possible,' as BYuT and OUNSD together will likely control 228 or 229 seats in the 450-member house, and the ruling coalition would prefer to have Litvin's party involved in the ruling so as to retain a more solid legislative majority, Lutsenko said.
'We cannot exclude the exit of some MPs from the majority,' Lutsenko said. 'This is a reason why we must have serious talks with Litvin, to see if there is common ground.'
Lutsenko's comments were a flat rejection of a proposal made by President Viktor Yushchenko on Wednesday suggestion all parties but the Communists conduct talks on forming a grand coalition.
The OUNSD leaders' position was at the same time a vote of confidence from Lutsenko towards BYuT and its charismatic leader Yulia Tymoshenko, who on Wednesday rejected Yushchenko's proposal outright, saying her party would never participate in a coalition with the pro-big business Regions.
The BYuT-OUNSD talks would focus on forming a common government programme, and only as a subsequent step would consider cabinet posts and which politicians from which parties would get the jobs.
Lutsenko hinted that Tymoshenko, widely-predicted to take the prime minister job, would make reforming Ukraine's murky energy production and transport industries a BYuT responsibility, saying 'financial, energy, and economic areas will, it seems, be a priority for BYuT.
Division of electoral spoils, and mutual accusations that their coalition partners were more interested in skimming money from government by graft rather than pursuing a pro-Europe agenda, led to the failure of coalition talks between the two parties in March 2006, enabling a Regions-led coalition to take control of parliament.
Ukraine's Central Election Commission on Thursday had counted practically all ballots from the Sunday vote, with the exception of a half-dozen individual polling sites in the Crimean peninsula.
Complaints of vote-fixing - an inevitable post-election event in Ukraine since the country's 1991 independence - were conspicuous by their absence.
For practical purposes, for the first time in memory, all major Ukrainian parties were on Thursday tacitly accepting the results of the Sunday vote.
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