Poroshenko 'Should Blame No One but Himself' for Wasted Opportunity

It’s only Kiev’s fault that the Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine association agreement resulted in a majority of votes (62 percent) against the deal, Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky wrote.

The Netherlands held a national referendum on EU's Association Agreement with Ukraine on April 6, 2016. The outcome of the vote is Kiev's own fault, Bershidsky believes. According to the journalist, the new administration wasted the defining two years after the Ukrainian revolution, and now Europe only sees Ukraine as a weak, corrupt state incessantly begging for aid.

"The faltering state has failed to gain support among ordinary Europeans, and that's nobody's fault but its own," Bershidsky asserted.

The referendum was initiated by the GeenStijl ("NoStyle") website and was aimed at sending a message to Brussels that the Netherlands won't blindly approve the EU's expansionist ways. It wasn't in fact about Ukraine, it was about showing that "EUligarchs" tend to do things that ordinary people don't understand, as in the case with the EU-Ukraine partnership deal.

In that respect, the referendum was a failure, the journalist admits, with only one third of the country's population participating in the vote and 20 percent disapproving of the EU's policy.

However, it was a great signal for politicians that they are falling down on their jobs, the columnist wrote. Two years have passed since February 2014, marked by sympathetic media coverage of Ukraine's "Revolution of Dignity" and the country's attempts to improve its economy in accordance with Europe's standards. The fact that only about 12 percent of Dutch voters supported "the fledgling pro-European democracy" speaks for itself, Bershidsky wrote.

The columnist cited Mustafa Nayyem, a pro-European Ukrainian legislator elected on Poroshenko's party ticket in 2014, who said that the outcome of the referendum was "a personal indictment of Petro Poroshenko" who partnered with the "elite" and the oligarchs, instead of turning to the civil society and "the new generation".
The referendum "may well be one of the final blows to [Poroshenko's] ability to hold on to power," Bershidsky predicted.

"Poroshenko and his team have only themselves to blame for wasting the best two-year window Ukraine has ever had to prove that its European aspirations and its adherence to European values are for real. In spectacular fashion, they have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory," the journalist wrote, adding that once there's a new administration, it will have hard time winning the European public's credit.