When President Petro Poroshenko arrived at his election headquarters in the Mystetskyi Arsenal cultural center late on April 21, he was the only cheerful person in the room. He thanked his supporters and smiled, while some people broke in tears.
Just minutes before his appearance, Ukrainian pollsters had published the results of the National Exit Poll, which showed Poroshenko would lose the presidential election to political satirist Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The incumbent president would receive only 25 percent of the vote, compared to Zelenskiy’s 73 percent.
It was not unexpected. Pre-election polls had shown almost exactly the same results. What was less predictable was Poroshenko’s dignified acceptance of defeat.
He said he would congratulate Zelenskiy on his win and would offer the new president help. He added that the coming days would be hard for him personally, but he would be able to rely on his family and his team in these difficult times.
“And on all of us!” Akhtem Chiygoz, a Crimean Tatar politician and former Russian political prisoner, shouted from the hall. The audience supported his words with loud applause.
“He has always been a fighter,” Chiygoz later told the Kyiv Post. “He’s a real leader.”
Chiygoz attributed Poroshenko’s loss to “a mass of negative information against him in the media.” Many other members of Poroshenko’s team expressed similar sentiments to explain the president’s poor election result.
While Poroshenko credits himself with several important achievements — such as preserving Ukraine’s statehood while under Russian assault and the creation of the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine — the president and his close circle have often found themselves at the center of scandals when journalists uncovered their alleged corruption.
Now Poroshenko, who was elected in 2014 in a landslide victory in the wake of the EuroMaidan Revolution, has been defeated by a newcomer with no experience in politics, a candidate who nevertheless won an even more overwhelming majority than Poroshenko during the last presidential election.
Expected defeat
At the end of his speech, Poroshenko invited more than 30 people onto the stage, including lawmakers, government ministers, artists, Crimean Tatar community leaders, and his large family. Many more, including the British and Canadian ambassadors, were cheering him from the hall.
Unlike during the first round of the vote on March 31, when Poroshenko won a place in the runoff, there was not much of a campaign atmosphere in his headquarters. There was no rush and no news broadcast from the regions. Nobody even announced the unpleasant exit poll results before they were shown.
The defeat was massive. Even in western Ukraine, Poroshenko’s stronghold during these elections, he received less than Zelenskiy, according to exit polls.
Serhiy Berezenko, a lawmaker from his party responsible for the campaign in the regions, said Poroshenko’s team was expecting higher turnout in the western regions and thought that the incumbent’s result would be better. “But the miracle didn’t happen,” he said.
Iryna Lutsenko — deputy head of Poroshenko’s party faction, the wife of Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, and Poroshenko’s friend — explained the election results as “people’s exhaustion from the war and economic difficulties.” Then she began accusing Ukrainian oligarchs of organizing a “special operation” to bring about his defeat.
“They are (Dmytro) Firtash, (Rinat) Akhmetov, (Ihor) Kolomoisky, (Victor) Pinchuk,” she said, naming all the main Ukrainian oligarchs except for Poroshenko, who is also considered to be an oligarch.
Lutsenko came to the headquarters without her husband, whom the law bars from endorsing any presidential candidate. Nevertheless, Yuriy Lutsenko was present at the forum where Poroshenko announced his presidential run in January.
Iryna Lutsenko did not answer a question about whether her husband was planning to resign under the new president. But Zelenskiy answered it himself: on April 21, he said that he would dismiss Lutsenko.
Future challenges
Poroshenko had particularly warm greetings for Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelian. Omelian was one of just three government ministers present at the president’s headquarters on this fateful day. The other two were Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, deputy prime minister for European integration, and Stepan Kubiv, deputy prime minister and economy minister.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who used to be Poroshenko’s protegee, didn’t show up. Poroshenko’s supporters were divided on whether he would stay loyal to Poroshenko when he ceases to be president.
Iryna Lutsenko said Groysman, who was “raised by Poroshenko,” would stay on Poroshenko’s side. But Nina Yuzhanina, another influential lawmaker from Poroshenko’s party, said she’s waiting to see Groysman’s real position in these new circumstances.
“(Groysman’s position) has always been ambiguous for me,” she told the Kyiv Post.
Yuzhanina, a first-term lawmaker, said she had already been warned by colleagues that Poroshenko loyalists would defect to another camp en mass after he loses the presidency.
“I’ve seen several of them (defecting) already, which was shocking for me,” she said. She specifically named Anton Herashchenko, a lawmaker from the People’s Front party, which is in coalition with Poroshenko’s faction in parliament.
Herashchenko, who is an adviser to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, has recently started writing favorable Facebook posts about Zelenskiy and unfavorable ones about Poroshenko. On April 19, he called Poroshenko “the man who lost everything.”
“We were together, we consulted each other to avoid mistakes,” Yuzhanina said. “Where does this anger come from?”
She said some more people close to Herashchenko had also started distancing themselves from Poroshenko, but refused to give names.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleksiy Sorokin contributed to this story.
