It’s Tymoshenko vs. the World
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said that she’d challenge last week’s presidential election results before she’d even lost to opposition candidate Viktor Yanukovych. But reversing this year’s results will be far more difficult than it was to reverse those of 2004.
Tymoshenko initially boasted that she’d incite a full-fledged second wave of the Orange Revolution, bringing protestors into the streets of Kiev under claims that Yanukovych won the election by fraudulent vote-counting practices. Now that she’s actually lost (by a slim margin of 3.48 percent), she says she’ll just take him to court instead.
“Not going to court would mean giving up Ukraine to criminals without a fight,” she said, claiming that more than a million votes in one Ukrainian region had been falsified.
The problem is that Tymoshenko is trying to recreate history without the support of hundreds of thousands of protestors, alone in a battle that will pit her against international organizations that have already verified the election as valid.
The Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe has officially declared the elections “professional, transparent and honest” and other international election monitors have lauded the election as “an impressive display of democracy.” President Obama and NATO have offered their congratulations to Yanukovych. If Tymoshenko continues to denounce Yanukovych’s victory as falsified, she’ll need to convince a host of international authorities in addition to a judge.
