KIEV, May 25 – Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn on Friday suggested that Parliament must be dissolved to hold early elections after lawmakers had failed to resolve a deadlock over the Russian language bill.

The bill triggered violent protests in Parliament on Thursday with at least one opposition lawmaker admitted to the hospital with a head injury. Opposition lawmakers continued the protest Friday, blocking Parliament and demanding the Regions Party drop the bill.

“None of proposals received overall support as each party has been sticking to its line,” Lytvyn said at a press conference. “In these conditions I suggested a political decision must accept [the deadlock], which must be followed by the next step, which is the self-dissolution of the Supreme Rada and holding early parliamentary elections.”

“We have to stop torturing the country,” he said.

Lytvyn’s proposal was quickly rejected by the ruling party.

“I think that Volodymyr Mykhaylovych [Lytvyn] is doing more PR rather than trying to solve the problem,” Oleksandr Yefremov, the leader of the Regions Party, said. “We had a period when Parliament had been dissolved [in 2007] and that had never produced any positive moments.”

The only legal way to dissolve Parliament is when lawmakers fail to hold a session for more than 30 days. In this case, President Viktor Yanukovych may – but is not obliged to – dismiss Parliament.

The dismissal of Parliament and early Parliamentary elections are believed to benefit opposition groups amid voters’ growing distrust to President Viktor Yanukovych’s Regions Party.

The opposition groups are expected to perform strongly at the elections and that may create serious problems for Yanukovych, who has so far enjoyed overwhelming support from lawmakers.

The Regions Party sees the suggested language legislation as helping it regain some of the lost popularity in mostly Russian-speaking eastern and southern regions of the country, vowed to do so on Friday.

Opposition groups see the legislation as extremely controversial and a provocative. It allows introducing a second state language on a given territory if at least 10% of the people living in the area speak that language.

The bill would almost automatically make the Russian language the second state language in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Odessa, Mykolayiv, Kherson and Chernihiv.

The bill would most certainly discourage people from using the Ukrainian language in those regions, and that may have devastating consequences for the national identity, opposition lawmakers have said.

Ukrainian people are split on the issue of languages with at least 46% rejecting the idea of granting the Russian language the state status, and 45% supporting the idea, with 8% undecided, according to the most recent poll by the Rating polling agency.

Although the numbers were steady over the past year, the share of those in favor of the Russian language dropped from 54% to 45% over the past three years, while those opposing it rose from 40% to 45%, according to the agency.

At least 71% of those supporting the Regions Party are in favor of granting the Russian language the state status in Ukraine, perhaps explaining why the party has been pushing hard for approving the legislation before the elections. (tl/ez)