By Steven Lee Myers
Published: July 12, 2006

With parliamentary debate in Ukraine reduced to insults and fistfights, supporters of President Viktor A. Yushchenko on Tuesday called on him to dissolve Parliament and hold a new election in a desperate effort to block the election of his opposition rival as the country’s new prime minister.

The request came more than three months after elections in March resulted in a splintered Parliament, with no party controlling a majority of seats, and it raised the chances that the political turmoil that followed would deepen, threatening Mr. Yushchenko’s vision of a democratic Ukraine more entwined in Europe.

By law, Parliament has only two more weeks to elect a prime minister and form a government, one that will wield new powers over the economy and domestic policy. After that, Mr. Yushchenko has the authority to disband Parliament, though calling new elections runs the risk that his party might do even more poorly than it did in March, when it finished a distant third.

“We are democrats,” said David Zhvaniya, a member of Mr. Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, saying that a new election would reunite the bloc of supporters of the Orange Revolution, who swept the president to power after a fraudulent vote in 2004. “And they unite one day before the execution.”

The execution he apparently had in mind was the nomination of Viktor F. Yanukovich, whom Mr. Yushchenko defeated in a rerun of that 2004 vote, as the new prime minister.

Mr. Yanukovich, a burly former prime minister who represents Ukraine’s Russian-speaking regions, emerged as the leader of a new majority in Parliament, with 238 out of 450 seats, after last week’s collapse of a coalition that had, for a few days at least, aligned itself with the president and his Western-looking foreign and economic policies.

Mr. Yanukovich, once maligned and abandoned even by supporters, appeared on the brink of a comeback, as the new coalition formally submitted his nomination on Tuesday. But Mr. Yushchenko’s supporters and those of Yulia V. Tymoshenko, also a former prime minister, made every effort to thwart that.

They stormed the Parliament floor during Tuesday’s session, scuffling with deputies from the new majority and disrupting what passed for deliberations with shouts and sirens. Mr. Yanukovich’s supporters had employed similar tactics to disrupt Parliament for two weeks when it seemed that Ms. Tymoshenko would be chosen as prime minister. (At least two deputies were slightly injured during the debate on Tuesday.)

Ms. Tymoshenko also called for new elections, saying, “We have only one way out.”

Mr. Yushchenko’s party also threatened to challenge the new majority in court, based on what party leaders called procedural violations by the Socialist Party, which had supported the Orange coalition until its leader, Oleksandr O. Moroz, switched sides last week and was elected speaker of Parliament with Mr. Yanukovich’s support.

Mr. Yushchenko himself, appearing increasingly isolated and indecisive, did not directly address the calls for a new vote. In a statement, he urged all parties to adhere to the country’s laws and demanded that Parliament approve the appointment of judges for the Constitutional Court, which lacks a quorum and thus has been paralyzed by the political impasse for months.

“Only the Constitutional Court is capable of assessing the constitutionality of the actions of all branches of power,” he said.