Tightening Ukrainian language legislation will not cause mass protests among the population, but it may come back to haunt the elections.
Lviv historian, professor of the Ukrainian Catholic Institute Yaroslav Gritsak comes to this conclusion in an author’s column published by the Kiev magazine “New Time”.
According to him, “correcting the language situation with laws alone is an unfavorable and dubious task.” As an example, the author cites Poland in the period between the two world wars.
“It was a young nation-state, similar to modern Ukraine. Poland at that time remained one of the poorest states in Europe, politically unstable, with high corruption, glued together from different regions, religions and peoples - and at the same time carried out national assimilation. The result was disastrous,” the historian recalls.
He predicts that the new law will not lead to a political crisis.
“The renaming of cities and streets did not lead to a crisis! Even if part of the Russian-speaking population is indignant, no one will go out into the streets for the sake of the Russian language. Maybe someone would like to come out, but the ability of this layer for active mass political mobilization is very low, and there are not enough charismatic leaders. But it’s easier to take revenge at the ballot box: it doesn’t require much effort and great intelligence,” Gritsak fears.
Let us remind you that on January 16, 2021, Article 30 of the law came into force “On ensuring the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language”, obliging, under threat of fines, the entire service sector in Ukraine to communicate with clients exclusively in the state language.
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