In October President Yushchenko dissolved parliament and called a snap election scheduled for 7 December. (See a previous post). A couple of weeks later, he announced that the election would be delayed by a week. Now, RFE/RL reports that the election has been delayed again. The election will not take place before the Orthodox Christmas on 6 January 2009. No date after that time has been set.

One reason for the delay is that Yulia Tymoshenko’s supporters opposed the election. As a result, parliament is refusing to grant funding for it.

I admit to being more than a little confused about the situation in Ukraine. My understanding was that when the government collapsed Yulia Tymoshenko would no longer be prime minister. However, this is clearly wrong. She is still in office, though also at odds, to say the least, with the president.

To further add to the complications, Ukrainian Journal reports that the opposition Regions Party, the largest group in Parliament, is flexing its muscles. With the help of some small parties plus defections from President Yushchenko’s party, they have managed to engineer the dismissal of the speaker of Parliament, who was an ally of President Yushchenko. Moreover, they are now trying to have Prime Minister Tymoshenko dismissed. As far as I can gather, they are trying to get parliament to reconvene to discuss the financial crisis. If they can do so, then they can also lodge a vote of no-confidence. If they do that, then they believe that they have the votes to dismiss Prime Minister Tymoshenko. To dismiss the speaker of parliament, they gathered 233 votes in the 450-member parliament. If they can dismiss Tymoshenko, then they will argue that they can form a new government based on that coalition, which would presumably mean that Viktor Yanukovych would once again become the prime minister. This would, also presumably, mean that an election would not take place as a viable government had been formed.