Read more: Inside Zelenskiy’s campaign: How social media, TV fame can win him presidency
In a presidential campaign crowded with 43 candidates, one name has moved to the top of virtually every poll: Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The reasons are clear. The popular comedy actor, businessman and political satirist entered politics like a fireball. He announced his presidential bid on New Year’s Eve. A month later, he led the race.
Through a combination of a strong personal brand and a cutting-edge campaign, Zelenskiy stands a chance at becoming the sixth president of Ukraine.
But Zelenskiy is not just this election’s biggest breakthrough. He is also its biggest mystery.
He doesn’t have a clear agenda. He doesn’t define himself as a liberal, a conservative, or as anyone, really. His election program is a seven-page brochure of general statements. And his comments on the country’s main problems — the war, corruption, poverty — are often either vague or naive.
Throw in the doubts about his independence, cast by his business links to Ihor Kolomoisky, a billionaire oligarch who manages his mammoth Ukrainian holdings from abroad — and Zelenskiy comes out as a wild card.
“There is vacuum in Ukrainian politics, and I want to fill it with honest people,” Zelenskiy told journalists, including from the Kyiv Post, who interviewed him on March 4. “I want to change the mood and the quality of our political establishment.”
Zelenskiy cultivates his aura of mystery: he rarely gives interviews and doesn’t appear on TV talk shows — the natural habitat of Ukrainian politicians. Instead, he relies on social media to talk to voters.
It is working: “President Zelenskiy” isn’t a joke anymore.
Beginner’s luck
As he enters a meeting room at his campaign headquarters, Zelenskiy looks energized and tired at the same time.
He spent the previous day filming some of the last scenes of season three of his hit TV series, “Servant of the People.” The series where he plays an ideal president of Ukraine is set to premiere on TV in March, conveniently preceding the election scheduled for March 31.
The promotional campaign for the series and the campaign for Zelenskiy’s presidency are intertwined. Laconic billboards placed around Kyiv read, “The president is the Servant of the People.” It’s impossible to tell whether they are promoting the show or the candidate.
It’s bringing its results. The latest poll, published by the Rating Group on March 4, confirmed his leadership in the race: 25 percent of decided voters back him.
President Petro Poroshenko (16.6 percent) and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (16.2 percent) trail behind the comedian, fighting for second place and a spot in the runoff. Not that they’ll have an easy time there: the polls project that Zelenskiy would win a one-on-one vote against either of them.
So it’s no wonder that at a rare meeting with journalists, Zelenskiy is in a good mood. He pours himself a coffee, grabs a snack and half-jokingly complains about having to watch his weight all the time for his film roles.
Apart from acting, he runs Kvartal 95, a production company that employs more than 300 people and makes feature movies, TV shows, and animated films. It is Ukraine’s biggest content production company that isn’t part of a TV station.
This is why, while Zelenskiy is primarily seen as an actor and a comic — or a clown, as his opponents prefer it — he maintains that he is more than that.
“I like both ‘comic’ and ‘clown.’ But actually, comedy and acting take 10 percent of my time,” Zelenskiy says, adding that his main job is to run Kvartal 95.
Empty book
Zelenskiy doesn’t hide the fact that he entered politics knowing almost nothing about how the country is run. So he takes briefings from experts.
Ex-Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk and ex-Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius joined his campaign as economic advisers. Zelenskiy says it is too early to promise them any official posts, but says he will be appointing “professionals like them” to government jobs if he wins.
Lawmaker and former investigative journalist Sergii Leshchenko was at several meetings with Zelenskiy, where the candidate was briefed on key issues like the fight against corruption and foreign policy, as well as at his meeting with U. S. Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker in February. He says that initially Zelenskiy had little knowledge of governance, but has been learning diligently.
“The fact that he doesn’t have professional knowledge is a threat and an opportunity at the same time,” says Leshchenko. “He doesn’t have the weight of past under-the-table dealings weighing on him. He isn’t part of the political system and isn’t contaminated with its viruses.”
This means that a lot will depend on who Zelenskiy surrounds himself with if he indeed wins the election.
“From the political point of view, Zelenskiy is a book that isn’t yet written,” Leshchenko adds. “It’s important that he uses the help of honest people when writing it.”
Actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy as his TV character Vasyl Holoborodko is sworn in as the president of Ukraine on an episode of his TV series, “Servant of the People,” where he plays a school teacher who wins presidency, much to his own surprise. (Courtesy)
Risk of Kolomoisky
When it comes to Zelenskiy, everyone’s main question is about Kolomoisky.
The oligarch who openly says he wants Poroshenko to lose the election has business links with Zelenskiy. Kolomoisky is the owner of 1+1, a TV station that has been Kvartal 95’s TV base for seven years. The company produces several comedy shows, and airs its hit series “Servant of the People” there too.
The general suspicion about Zelenskiy is that he may be running for president as the oligarch’s proxy.
Both Kolomoisky and Zelenskiy have denied this, saying they have only business relations. Zelenskiy adds that he would have no reason to enter such a deal with Kolomoisky.
“I have enough money,” he says.
While “enough money” is a relative concept, Zelenskiy indeed is a rich man. He owns a number of real estate properties in Ukraine and abroad, and declared earning about Hr 7 million, or $260,000, in 2018.
Suspicions grew when more obscure links to Kolomoisky showed up during Zelenskiy’s presidential campaign. The oligarch’s former bodyguard was spotted working for Zelenskiy. And the showman’s security guards drive a minivan registered to one of Kolomoisky’s companies, Ukrainian media reported.
To that, Zelenskiy says that when his campaign started, he asked his business partners at 1+1 TV channel to recommend a security firm — and ended up with Kolomoisky’s people.
Zelenskiy’s connection to Kolomoisky is something everyone is concerned about, including foreign diplomats, according to Leshchenko.
If Zelenskiy tells the truth and he isn’t running as a proxy of Kolomoisky, the oligarch may still try to influence him if he wins.
“Limiting the influence of Kolomoisky will be his biggest challenge,” says Leshchenko.
Zelenskiy declares he is ready to do that.
“Oligarchs shouldn’t have any influence on the country’s politics,” Zelenskiy says.
He also says he won’t help Kolomoisky in his legal fight with Ukraine over PrivatBank.
The largest private bank in Ukraine, PrivatBank was nationalized in December 2016. Now the state-owned bank is suing its former owners, Kolomoisky and his business partner Hennadiy Boholyubov, for billions of dollars they allegedly siphoned from the bank before it was nationalized.
“If the court finds the money was stolen, then of course, it needs to be returned,” Zelenskiy said.
Peace deal
Apart from Kolomoisky, the other concern for everyone watching Zelenskiy’s campaign is the lack of clarity when he talks about his solution for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Zelenskiy says he wants to stop the war, but his plan seems unrealistic.
For one thing, he wants to start peace negotiations by asking Russia to publicly proclaim their conditions to end the war — which would mean the Russians would have to admit their soldiers have indeed been fighting Ukraine for five years.
“I want to ask them what they want, why they came to us. I want to have a sincere talk, a discussion,” Zelenskiy says.
Does it mean peace at any price? No, he says. Giving away any territory of Ukraine, including the annexed Crimea peninsula, isn’t an option.
“We don’t sell out our people or our land,” Zelenskiy says.
Zelenskiy says he supports the plan to bring international peacekeepers to Donbas: first into the smaller cities, then into the regional capitals Donetsk and Luhansk. But he gets confrontational when journalists pressure to know how exactly he will make it happen.
Obstacles ahead
Despite the generous polling results, winning and even getting into the runoff won’t be easy for Zelenskiy.
There are two things that can get in the way: low turnout and election fraud.
Zelenskiy has strong support among the younger Ukrainians, who traditionally don’t vote as actively as the older generation.
Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told Novoye Vremya magazine that Zelenskiy could lose up to one-third of his potential votes because younger voters won’t come to the polls.
However, Zelenskiy’s campaign strategist Dmytro Razumkov is more optimistic.
“Young people didn’t vote before because there was no candidate representing them,” he told LB.ua. “Now there is one.”
The other possible threat is election fraud.
The votes will be cast and counted at around 30,000 polling stations and election committees. Candidates have the right to delegate their representatives to monitor the process at each of them and protect their candidate’s result.
Major candidates like Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, who lead large parties, do it. Zelenskiy, however, has a small team and not enough representatives to send to every station.
He believes he can still find them.
In January, he called for people who want to help his campaign to register on his website. He says that 560,000 people registered.
“Out of them, we selected 199 lawyers to sit on the district election committees, and 199 legal representatives,” Zelenskiy says. “They are now looking for people who will represent me at the local election committees.”
Parliament next
Regardless of how Zelenskiy performs in the presidential elections, his party will run for parliament in October, he says.
The party in question is a bigger mystery than Zelenskiy himself. It is named Servant of the People after Kvartal’s hit TV series and it is headed by Ivan Bakanov, the director of Kvartal.
Thanks to Zelenskiy’s personal brand, Servant of the People came first in the party poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in February. It was supported by 24.6 percent of decided voters.
Meanwhile, the established parties with seats in parliament trailed behind: Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna with 18 percent and the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko with 10.3 percent.
If he does well in the presidential election, Zelenskiy could bring a large group of lawmakers in the parliament in October. In the 2014 election, Poroshenko’s party got 135 out of 400 seats — the vote took place five months after he won the presidency.
Zelenskiy doesn’t have people to put on the party list yet, but says his campaign will launch a search for them after the presidential election. He says he wants to find as many people with a legal background as possible — he thinks it will help with legislative work.
“I’m really counting on the parliamentary election. A president needs his own party,” he says, but immediately corrects himself: “Not his own party. A party of allies.”
