Read more: Volodymyr Zelenskiy: Green light to presidency?
Comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is vying to become the next president of Ukraine, has been praised for his smart, unorthodox election campaign, which has secured him a strong lead in the polls.
But Zelenskiy isn’t reinventing the wheel. He is often compared to U. S. President Donald Trump, who won the 2016 election as an anti-elite candidate with a business background and an appeal to protest voters tired of established politicians.
While this is also true for Zelenskiy, in terms of strategy, his campaign is more akin to the triumphant 2008 election campaign of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Similar to Obama, Zelenskiy is harnessing the power of social media to communicate with his supporters, attract new ones, and organize them locally.
Zelenskiy’s Ze! campaign spans the major social networking sites Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube, where it has a total of nearly one million subscribers and followers.
The head of the Ze! digital campaign strategy, Mikhail Fyodorov, boasts that 560,000 supporters joined the campaign through the official website in just over two months. “None of the other candidates has that many real people,” he says, alluding to bots and fake accounts, widely used in election campaigns.
Unlike many politicians who delegate their social media accounts to PR professionals, Zelenskiy generates a lot of content himself. As a television producer, he has turned his campaign into a reality show broadcast through video blogs and impromptu selfie videos.
Fyodorov says that Zelenskiy films the videos on his smartphone and shares them on his personal Instagram account with 2.7 million followers, from where they get reposted by the campaign’s official accounts and fan pages. In defiance of the common business practice of having unofficial pages removed, Fyodorov doesn’t seek to shut down clone pages and prefers to engage them instead.
“We have some 2,000 unofficial pages created by fans, but we decided not to block them. We give them sources like photos and brand books, and they are first to receive news and updates,” he told the Kyiv Post.
“All our activities are aimed at attracting and engaging people in the campaign, because we don’t have the budgets of our rivals.”
A flurry of negative ads on the internet have depicted Zelenskiy as a clown or a puppet of billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, amplifying rumors of that he is a proxy for the oligarch.
Zelenskiy’s team estimated that the average cost-per-click of such negative ads would be $20,000 per day, and has encouraged their followers to click on them. The more clicks, the more their obscure sponsors have to pay, Fyodorov said.
Criticism
As open as Zelenskiy appears to be on social media, he has been the most resistant of all the top presidential candidates to using traditional venues for promotion. He turns down invitations to speak at conferences and public events. He doesn’t go on political TV shows, and he rarely sits down for interviews with journalists — in other words, he rejects what other politicians see as extra opportunities to appear in public and reiterate their election promises.
Political consultant Dmytro Razumkov acts as Zelenskiy’s representative to the media. He says the reason is Zelenskiy has been busy with his work routine: filming the third season of his hit TV series “Servant of the People,” slated to premiere in March, and touring the country.
Zelenskiy’s election slogan “The president is a servant of the people” copies the slogan of “Servant of the People,” where he plays a school teacher who is elected president of Ukraine. Snippets from the show are often used in Zelenskiy’s video blogs and on his official campaign channels.
The Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a Kyiv-based non-governmental election watchdog, appealed to the Central Election Commission asking to establish whether the TV show can be considered part of Zelenskiy’s election campaign. If so, he will have to pay for the TV broadcast of the third season from his election fund.
Another Ukrainian election watchdog, OPORA, has called for presidential candidates to separate their professional activities from election campaigning and to refrain from using charity.
From December to mid-February, Zelenskiy’s comedy group Vecherniy Kvartal traveled around Ukraine and abroad with its New Year’s holiday program, which media dubbed a “charity tour” because the comedy cast gave two concerts a day in each city: a free one for Donbas war veterans, doctors, teachers, and disabled people; and a commercial one for fans who purchased tickets.
Attitudes changed after Zelenskiy announced his presidential bid on New Year’s Eve and took the lead in the polls in February. Last month, critics accused him of bribing voters with free tickets to his show, known for its scathing political satire.
The tour ran into hurdles. In Lviv, a concert was blocked by a rally, which Kvartal 95 production company claimed was paid for and orchestrated by Zelenskiy’s political rivals. In Vinnytsia, the company had to cancel a show because a concert hall reportedly belonging to the Ministry of Defense refused to provide them the stage.
“This is not Zelenskiy’s solo performance but a show that involves all the cast of Kvartal 95, and Zelenskiy is one of them,” Kvartal 95 replied to critics in a statement on Feb. 11. “During the concerts, there are no calls to vote or not to vote for any presidential candidate.”
OPORA didn’t find any violations in Vecherniy Kvartal’s charity concerts but registered some unlawful campaigning during the shows of another Kvartal 95 project, League of Laughter, a comedy contest.
According to OPORA analyst Oleksandr Klyuzhev, concertgoers were shown Zelenskiy’s election ad as well as a promo teaser for the upcoming season of “Servant of the People” before the concert.
Television
Zelenskiy’s campaign would not be complete without 1+1 TV channel, owned by oligarch Kolomoisky. By virtue of being the channel’s long-term producer of comedy content, Kvartal 95 has seven hours a week of airtime for its shows, some of which star Zelenskiy.
In addition, the channel announced two premieres for March: the third season of “Servant of the People” and a BBC documentary about the 40th U. S. President Ronald Reagan narrated in Ukrainian by Zelenskiy.
In an email to the Kyiv Post, 1+1 admitted it had decided to take advantage of the hype around Zelenskiy’s decision to go into politics.
“Reagan traded his acting career for politics and became one of the most successful American presidents when he ended the Cold War. We believe it’s an interesting case for viewers,” 1+1’s press service wrote.
Growing supporter base
Two months ago, Zelenskiy’s political ambition seems like a joke: He had neither a political platform, nor a team. He crowdsourced his election platform, having received hundreds of ideas from social media users. Now he is crowdsourcing a pool of professionals to work for him.
In a video from Feb. 25, Zelenskiy, once again, asked his audience for help: through a form on a website, anyone can recommend a professional or an expert. “No more nepotism and backroom appointments to office. Democracy in Ukraine has to become reality,” he said.
Zelenskiy, who has never held any government of political job, brought in the best experts and reform watchers to learn from. In the past month, he regularly met with civil society leaders on anti-corruption efforts, utility tariffs, and judicial reform.
“His lack of political experience is bad for politicians but not for ordinary Ukrainians. He doesn’t know how to build corruption schemes, how to siphon off the budget, or how to sell seats on the parliamentary list,” Razumkov says sarcastically. “Show me which university other presidents have graduated from. And if actors can’t run for the presidency, let’s ban doctors, teachers, and truck drivers too.”
Zelenskiy got backed up by two former members of the government, ex-Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk and ex-Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius, who became his economic advisers for the time being and were present at his meetings with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. and French ambassadors.
Lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, who quit the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction last week amid an embezzlement scandal involving a top ally if the president, has also been seen in Zelenskiy’s orbit lately.
“Zelenskiy is a product of our time, of our new reality. Politics merges with show business and everything turns upside down,” Leshchenko told the Kyiv Post.
Voters
In a fresh poll by the Rating sociological group released on March 4, Zelenskiy increased his margin: He stands at 25 percent, nine percentage points ahead of his closest competitors — President Petro Poroshenko and Batkivshchyna leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
Zelenskiy has also been an unchallenged leader among Ukrainian youth under the age of 30 — the most passive voter base, and therefore often overlooked by veteran politicians.
Zelenskiy is trying to break the wall of indifference and incentivize young people to go to the polling stations on March 31 with a series of funny videos that also explain how to navigate the voting-related bureaucracy.
Kyiv native Tetiana Vavryk, 22, who currently studies in Lviv, says she has never voted before because she didn’t feel that her vote mattered. This time she will cast her ballot for Zelenskiy, who won her trust by being close to the people and willing to change the country.
“His lack of political experience is more of an advantage than a weakness, because it means he’s not involved in this system, which is rotten to the core,” she said. “I don’t think he’s Kolomoisky’s puppet. The man works on the oligarch’s channel, and it’s a weak argument considering that all TV channels in Ukraine belong to oligarchs.”
“I like that he draws attention to the needs of the young and the issue of brain drain,” Vavryk continues. “I have studied abroad and I understand why young people leave. To be honest, I often think about it too.”
Lviv resident Oleksandr Smekhov, 28, works in wholesale commerce. He supports Zelenskiy because he says that the presidential candidate is looking at the problems of various regions in the country. Smekhov believes this means Zelenskiy is taking a responsible approach to the country’s issues.
“I like he engages young, ambitious people, and constantly confers with experts. I believe he’s a professional manager, judging by his business, and professionals work with professionals,” Smekhov told the Kyiv Post.
Freelance designer Anna Shishkevich, 30, moved to Odesa from Luhansk, a city in eastern Ukraine occupied by Kremlin proxies for five years now. She feels that while Zelenskiy isn’t ideal, he represents her better than any other candidate.
“I really wish that Zelenskiy will manage to return the occupied territories to Ukraine, but I tend to think that for it to happen, the leadership has to change not in Ukraine but in Russia,” she says.
“Zelenskiy isn’t my ideal candidate but I don’t see a better one,” she continues. “I like that he made his wealth in front of our eyes and not privatizing plants in the 1990s. I like his position on tolerance and equal rights for all social groups. He doesn’t express homophobia, which is very important for me, and he stands up for Russian-speaking Ukrainians.”
Read more: Comedy star Zelenskiy rides TV popularity and populism into politics
