Saturday, March 25, 2006

It may be over but the weight challenged lady has yet to sing

LEvko posted last night that the electioneering is over. There is a law on the books that all campaigning for office must cease at a certain time before the election. I'm not sure what that period is but what it meant was that it was over last night.

There were rallies and concerts around Ukraine last night in teh final push. The one in Maidan was put on by Poplovski, I think that's his name. (I talked about him in my last post.) He is a minor figure and mostly promoter but he had as many for his get out the vote concert as Yulia did for hers last week. Maybe the entertainment was better, I don't know.

And there was a concert in Donetsk last night. Yanukovych spoke by hookup from Kiev where he is now. He rallied the troops who are preparing for victory and they responded. Blood is on the water and they can smell it. Its color is orange. But what that victory might mean is anybody's guess right now.

Akhmetov spoke there too. He's a youthful looking 40 year old. There are those who say he is one with whom a constructive alliance might be made because he is concerned with being accepted in the West. (He has businesses, he needs those businesses to be respectable for them to grow, etc.) Its the basic argument of self interest that is so compelling to Westerners but which doesn't compute all that well here. So it is amusing when it is used as a law of nature to predict what a person will do and to bank him in to a certain way of acting. But it ain't a law of nature and Akhmetov's sees his interests as what really?

We were out walking yesterday evening and saw Zinchenko at the little square in our neck of the woods. He was talking about fiscal responsibility and had a number of people gathered there to hear him. He was probably making stops like that all evening last night. (He's the one who resigned citing corruption of the Yuschenko administration as the cause. Poroshenko was the one he was meaning.)

Anyway, they are taking down the posters on the walls and packing away the literature. The only thing left is for the, you know, fat lady to hit it. That comes tomorrow.

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