Political Biography
Yuriy Lutsenko gained public fame as one of the leaders of the Ukraine without Kuchma! campaign, which followed the Cassette Scandal of 2000. He was also one of the "faces of Orange revolution". Lutsenko was a long-term member (since 1991) of the Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU), prior to his appointment to the executive branch he was people’s deputy in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) since February 2002. Lutsenko belonged to so-called "right wing" of SPU which takes a pro-European position akin to social democratic parties in the rest of Europe, rather than a post-Soviet conservative socialism.
As a Minister, Lutsenko refused to run in the 2006 parliamentary election on his party list. However, he has been running for both the Kiev City Council and Rivne Oblast Council simultaneously in the lists of Socialist Party – "to make the point", as he explained. Having won these seats, Lutsenko resigned from both in favor of his Minister's position as the Constitution of Ukraine prohibits occupying the positions in the legislative and executive branches of the government at the same time.
Read more about this topic: Yuriy Lutsenko
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or biography:
“I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)