The Ukrainian parliamentary majority coalition intends to initiate a referendum to ask citizens whether the 2004 constitutional reform that gave less powers to the president was reasonable, the head of the pro-presidential Party of Regions parliamentary faction said on Tuesday.
The statement comes just over a week after President Viktor Yanukovych said in his address to the nation on Constitution Day that the reform caused a "misbalance" and a "serious crisis of power" and proposed reviewing the constitution.
"We are to revise the hasty constitutional reform introduced in 2004, which has misbalanced the state mechanism. I think we should ask the people's advice on the issue," Oleksandr Efremov told Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday.
The constitutional amendments, approved under President Leonid Kuchma, were introduced in Ukraine in summer 2006, giving more powers to the parliament and making the country a parliamentary-presidential republic.
Kuchma's successor Viktor Yushchenko was seeking to abolish the reform.
Some Ukrainian analysts have voiced doubt that a new constitutional reform could be approved.
"They will now try to return Kuchma's competences to Yanukovych - so he could dismiss the cabinet and so on. But whether the reform will be approved in such a variant - this is a big question. Because both Lytvyn bloc lawmakers and Communists, as well as powerful people like oligarchs from the Party of Regions, will not allow such a reform to be passed if they understand that it will lead to monocracy, the strengthening of the president's personal power," political scientist Vadim Karasev told Ukrainian newspaper Segodnya.
The Party of Regions, the Communist Party, and the parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn's bloc, as well as several independents, comprise the new Ukrainian majority coalition formed following February's presidential polls.
"Yanukovych is afraid of losing the parliamentary elections in 2012, as a result of which there will be a parliamentary majority in the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), which he could not control," Oleh Liashko, a member of the opposition bloc led by the former prime minister and Yanukovych's bitter foe, Yulia Tymoshenko, told Segodnya.
Yanukovych defeated Tymoshenko with less than a 3% gap in the presidential run-off in February. The Tymoshenko-led parliamentary majority coalition was then dissolved, Tymoshenko's government was disbanded, with the ex-prime minister moving to the opposition.
KIEV, July 6 (RIA Novosti)
