The main reason that parties such as myself might be reluctant to acknowledge its acceptability/success lies with the fact that its impossible to measure success while the country is being torn apart, the economy is spiraling and its difficult to see how united the Ukrainians where on the subject of the EU association agreement in the first place.
I have a feeling that the protests which toppled Ukraine's leader started as a small protest with a few hundred people that soon turned into outrage and a flurry of various grievances such as police brutality, freedom of speech infringement, corruption etc which is what I think was the uniting glue of the protests:
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I have been attending protests since day one: 21 November 2012. It started with a peaceful protest of a couple hundred people. I painted a poster - “Europe Starts With You” - and stood alone near the independence monument. Then young people started to come up and talk, and, with many of those I met on those November days, we are still meeting regularly at the protests.
The day the Ukrainian government decided to stop the agreement with the EU, I almost cried in disbelief. The government had finally shown its true face. We were so naive and optimistic that we actually believed they wouldn’t. Then the situation suddenly changed. It was not about Europe anymore, but about stopping the violence against peaceful protesters, ensuring justice and demanding the resignation of the criminal government and its president.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/04/ukraine-crisis-protesters-kiev-euromaidan-independence-squareHowever I suspect that groups which later joined the protests and were more organized and seemed to be making political deals/alliances in the background seemed to be better able to influence the tone or direction of the actual outcomes.
Yat's himself never made any pretenses about whether or not the decisions of his government would be extremely unpopular in light of the Ukraine's circumstances and the need to avoid the Ukraine from defaulting by complying with IMF and EU demands in terms of austerity measures for the sake of bail out funds.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-31/ukrainian-president-backs-kamikake-yatsenyuk-as-premier.htmlhttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-13/ukraine-s-yatsenyuk-sees-commitment-to-change-helping-imf-loan.htmlAdditionally there was never any doubt that there was disagreement with closer ties to the EU from the East and Crimea:
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There is little doubt that Viktor Yanukovych's rule is corrupt. It stands for the interests of the richest few in Ukraine's highly unequal society and is responsible for the brutal suppression of opposition. The majority of protesting Ukrainians hope for a just, fair and democratic society, even if naively connecting this hope to an idealised "Europe".
Yet Euromaidan, Ukraine's pro-EU protest movement, has still not become a point of conflict between the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian society as a whole. According to the polls, support for Euromaidan is heavily concentrated in the western and central regions, while Ukrainians living in the east and the south of the country overwhelmingly disapprove. After mass violent clashes with the police started on Sunday, in which a leading role was played by a far-right network of groups called Right Sector, there is no doubt that people in the eastern and southern regions would condemn the protests even more. This is unfortunate because the agenda of the protest has shifted from a desire to be associated with Europe to the struggle against the police state after parliament ripped up the constitution and rushed through laws restricting, among others, the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/22/ukraine-protests-europe-far-right-violenceSure enough protests about austerity have apparently taken place already and while no way near on the scale of the Euromaidan protests; I have the nagging suspicion that we may have somewhat overplayed the desire for the EU integration rather than EU values for the sake of our own interests when it comes to looking at the country as a whole (ie: prior to loosing a chunk of its territory).
http://uatoday.tv/news/ukrainians-protest-against-2015-budget-proposal-outside-parliament-building-400074.htmlFor me its far to early to tell whether success is measurable. Once the situation stabilizes and the Ukraine begins to prosper while its citizens show resilience to austerity I think we'll be able to turn around and say yep 'success!'.
As for the 9% election vote for parties running against Maidan I assume your referring to the presidential election in hindsight of the Crimea and the East having been lost?
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