Viktor Yushchenko
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- In full:
- Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko
- Title / Office:
- president (2005-2010), Ukraine
- Political Affiliation:
- Our Ukraine
- Role In:
- Ukraine crisis
Viktor Yushchenko (born February 23, 1954, Khoruzhivka, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.) Ukrainian politician who served as president of Ukraine (2005–10).
Yushchenko grew up in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine. He was educated at the Ternopil Finance and Economics Institute, where he graduated with a degree in economic sciences in 1975. Returning to Sumy, he became an accounting assistant on a collective farm. He briefly served in the Soviet army before accepting a position as an economist at the Sumy branch of the Soviet State Bank in 1976. In the late 1980s he served as deputy chairman of the board of directors at the Agro-Industrial Bank of Ukraine, and from 1990 to 1993 he was the first deputy chairman of the board at Bank Ukraina.
In 1993 Yushchenko was appointed governor of newly independent Ukraine’s national bank. In this position he oversaw the introduction in 1996 of the national currency, the hryvnya. In 1999 Pres. Leonid Kuchma appointed Yushchenko prime minister. Over the next year and a half, many analysts credited Yushchenko with helping Ukraine emerge from a protracted financial and economic crisis. Among other measures, he introduced fiscal restraints and ended the costly practice of issuing subsidies to unprofitable companies. In 2001 Kuchma abruptly dismissed Yushchenko, partly because he feared his growing popularity. Yushchenko responded by forming a broad-based democratic coalition called Our Ukraine, which was victorious in the parliamentary elections later that year and gave him a platform from which to mount a credible challenge to Kuchma, who had been accused of overseeing an increasingly corrupt administration.
During his campaign for the presidency in 2004, Yushchenko became seriously ill from dioxin poisoning in an apparent assassination attempt; his face was disfigured and pockmarked. Mass protests, which became known as the Orange Revolution, followed a runoff round in which Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, backed by Kuchma and generally considered pro-Russian and cool toward western Europe as compared with Yushchenko, had been declared the winner. The Supreme Court, after invalidating that result, ordered a second runoff, to be held in December 2004. Yushchenko was officially confirmed as the winner the following month.
As president, Yushchenko quickly encountered difficulties. He faced a fuel crisis beginning in May 2005, and in September he replaced his entire cabinet, accusing it of incompetence. In the 2006 parliamentary elections, Yushchenko’s party finished third, and eventually he was forced to approve the nomination of Yanukovych for prime minister. A power struggle between Yushchenko and Yanukovych escalated in early 2007, when parliament passed laws that seriously curtailed Yushchenko’s authority. In particular, the new legislation ended the president’s right to reject parliament’s choice of prime minister.
Wanting to end the political tension, Yushchenko called for another round of parliamentary elections—the third general election in three years—to be held in September 2007. Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party finished third, behind Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and the party led by Yulia Tymoshenko, a fellow leader of the Orange Revolution who had briefly served as prime minister in 2005. Despite the relatively poor showing of Yushchenko’s party, an alliance between it and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc—the so-called Orange parties—gave them a majority large enough to form a government with Tymoshenko as prime minister. Dissent between the former Orange allies grew as the president and prime minister balanced the often conflicting goals of maintaining positive relations with Russia and gaining membership in the European Union.
By the time of the next presidential election, held in January 2010, Yushchenko’s popularity had plummeted, and he received only about 5 percent of the vote. In February a runoff poll between the top two candidates, Yanukovych and Tymoshenko, determined that Yanukovych would replace Yushchenko as president.