Eight months before the next Ukrainian presidential election, current president Petro Poroshenko’s support rate fluctuates between 5 percent and 8 percent. Yulia Tymoshenko, head of the Batkivshchyna party and former Prime Minister, leads the polls with 10-13 prcent of the votes. Polls show two other people to be more popular than Poroshenko – oppositionist Yuriy Boyko and independent MP Anatoliy Hrytsenko. Some polls even suggest Ukrainian comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky to stand better chances than the current president.
But modern Ukrainian history shows that things can change in the months leading up to a presidential election. In early 1999, Leonid Kuchma had 6 percent of the population’s support, but nine months later he won the first round of the presidential election with 36 percent of the votes and beat communist Petro Symonenko in the second round crowning himself as the President of Ukraine. Fast-forward 10 years and the then-president Viktor Yushchenko has 0.8 percent support leading up to the 2010 election. Receiving 5 percent of the votes, he didn’t come close to beating opponent Viktor Yanukovych.
