Gontareva’s tough anti-crisis measures attracted many enemies while winning praise from investors and the IMF, which props up Ukraine.
Pavel Polityuk -
If Ukraine’s central bank chief needed any more incentive to quit, last week she woke up to find the image in a Russian flag spray-painted onto the wall of her house and a gaggle of young protesters calling her a Russian stooge.
After a sustained hate campaign that also included a coffin laid at her door, Valeria Gontareva finally quit on Monday. Her departure, with no obvious candidate for a successor, leaves President Petro Poroshenko with one fewer ally in power at a time when lenders keeping Ukraine afloat already question his ability to follow through on promised reforms.
Gontareva’s bloody-mindedness in enacting tough anti-crisis measures attracted many enemies while winning praise from investors and the International Monetary Fund, which props up the country with $17.5 billion bailout.
The appearance that Poroshenko could not shield Gontareva, his former business partner, from being hounded out of office may make it harder to replace her.
The president will struggle to find someone willing to step into her “kamikaze” role, said Oleksander Kirsh, a lawmaker with the People’s Front, which is in coalition with Poroshenko’s bloc.
“Even those who are seen as being part of the president’s team will wonder
about agreeing” to head the central bank “if Poroshenko cannot protect them,” Kirsh said.
Poroshenko, owner of Ukraine’s biggest chocolate company, was elected in 2014 promising to unite the country after a popular uprising toppled a pro-Russian leader and Moscow responded by seizing the Crimea peninsula.
Since then, a revolt by pro-Russian separatists in the east has bogged down in bloody stalemate with 10,000 dead, and the economy, struggling to wean itself from dependency on Russia and plagued by official corruption, has been on life support.
Support for Poroshenko’s party has fallen to just 11.9 per cent as of December, from 21.7 per cent in October 2014, according to the Kiev International Institute of Sociology.
Polls show he would lose to former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko at the next presidential election due in 2019. Recent months have seen political setbacks that make him appear even weaker.
He found himself on the wrong side of public opinion when he initially opposed activists imposing an economic blockade of territory held by pro-Russian separatists; two months later he made the blockade government policy.
He also signed a parliamentary amendment that will dilute one of the biggest anti-corruption reforms enacted since the 2014 protests. He says he was forced to accept the amendment by recalcitrant lawmakers.
“Poroshenko follows behind public opinion,” lawmaker and investigative journalist Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the president’s own bloc, said. “Poroshenko’s agenda is formed by others instead of him, and he must follow it.”
Poroshenko’s office did not reply to a request for comment.
The government of his protege, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, has only a thin majority in parliament to pass difficult measures demanded by the IMF, such as raising the pension age and lifting a ban on land sales.
Not passing them risks delaying or shrinking the amount of money the IMF will disburse at a time when Ukraine’s economic growth is expected to weaken to 2 per cent from an earlier IMF projected 2.9 per cent because of the blockade on separatists.
The IMF in a report last week flagged its concerns that domestic politics could derail the bailout programme.
Gontareva, who has also been in office since 2014, has been responsible for many of the reforms enacted to secure the lifeline from the IMF.
She switched Ukraine to a flexible exchange rate and shuttered half the country’s banks — including many which the authorities say were used as
cash cows or money-laundering vehicles by their owners. — Reuters
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