(The short answer here is “not really,” and the longer answer is “if so, not really in a way that mattered, but at least you clicked on the link.” I don’t have time for a very long/in-depth piece here, but I’ve seen some comments popping up and I want to be sure to clear the air a bit about what happened in Ukraine yesterday.)
In light of this weekend’s election of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, there’s a narrative gaining some currency on this side of the Atlantic: much as in the United States, Ukraine opted to reject a very pro-Western politician in favor of guy from a popular TV show, a neophyte with no experience, as an anti-establishment vote. Oh, and he was the candidate favored by the Kremlin and accused of coordination with the Kremlin about a week before the elections. It looks bad when you put it that way!
The differences are much more striking, though.
For one thing, it’s hard to overestimate just how much of a failure Poroshenko has been regarding the central crux of his campaign promise, to curb widespread corruption in the political establishment. Far from doing so, the public sense is that, after early and mostly photo-op gestures towards addressing the problem, Poroshenko was in fact indulging in it. That may or may not be a fair assessment of his policies, but it was certainly the dominant mood, and a recent, massive military procurement scandal was for many the final straw, especially when coupled with rising cost of living and shrinking pensions.
With internal support collapsing, Poroshenko leaned hard on his pro-Western bona fides to the point that he further alienated other voters, so much so that a late-campaign pivot to positive ads about his record was already far too little, far too late. The potentially damning accusation that Zelenskiy’s campaign was in contact with the Kremlin — thinly sourced and not particularly credible, I might add — landed just a day or so after news broke about the Poroshenko campaign resorting to underhanded tactics, so the accusation against Zelenskiy barely made a blip (Matthew Kupfer of Kyiv Post has been covering this extensively in English). And with Poroshenko campaigning so aggressively as the most anti-Kremlin candidate, it may also have dulled the public’s interest in whether the Kremlin would be more supportive of the guy who didn’t claim that pose. I mean, obviously they would.
Zelenskiy, meanwhile, who’s most famous for playing a fictional president in a satirical show called Servant of the People (about a non-politician who gets elected president of Ukraine, natch), countered Poroshenko’s “us v. them” rhetoric with a bland “I’ll be president for everyone”-style platitude that, platitude as it may be, resonated with voters exhausted by war, financial struggle, and domestic strife. To some extent, his victory also reflects a pure anti-establishment sentiment, choosing someone who at least has no hands in any of the usual cookie jars. And that leads to another point that some commenters have made: as much as certain outlets are comparing Zelenskiy’s victory to Trump’s, the fact is, it was Poroshenko who tied his political trajectory to his big business ventures, a billionaire candy magnate and former “Chocolate King” whose work in the political world coincided with the rise of his own industrial successes and organization. To the extent that Zelenskiy is seen as an “outsider,” it’s that he has none of this political-industrial entanglement that dragged Poroshenko down.
Finally, and this point cannot be stated loudly enough: Zelenskiy didn’t so much win on the strength of his ideas as Poroshenko lost on his. Poroshenko didn’t just lose the pro-Russian voters (he’d never have won them) or those easily swayed by propaganda. Poroshenko didn’t just lose the exhausted moderates or the geographical “middle” of the country. Poroshenko also lost the hardcore nationalists, who organized protests against him (for all his failings he was not, after all, an ethno-nationalist until some gestures in that direction at the last possible minute). In the end, Poroshenko’s attempt at carving out an exclusively pro-Western electorate left him with nearly no electorate at all: Zelenskiy won just about everybody. Poroshenko’s support collapsed to only two bastions, the region around Lviv, and the Ukrainian diaspora. Just look at this electoral map:
Source: https://t.co/K1gkAXJBR8
(Images can be deceiving, as we all know from our own elections, but here the numbers are even more staggering: for comparison, Zelenskiy’s margin of victory was roughly 30 points higher than Reagan’s 1984 sweep of Mondale. No U.S. president has come even within twenty points of Zelenskiy’s total landslide here.)
The big question now is this: what kind of president will Zelenskiy be? Given his inexperience, a lot depends on who he appoints as advisors, especially if he, like Trump, finds the role exhausting and hands over a lot of responsibilities to the people around him. This biggest danger moving forward is that he surrounds himself with grifters that he either indulges or lacks the backbone to combat. His campaign was modern and savvy but also clownish, so lacking in policy substance that it’s hard to read the tea leaves moving forward.
But there are at least a few significant aspects of his campaign that promise a leader different from our own clown in certain key ways. First is the very fact of Zelenskiy’s campaign message being a pointedly inclusive and pacifying one, nothing like Trump’s xenophobic belligerence. And there is the fact that Zelenskiy himself belongs to a minority in a country where anti-Semitism represents a real and present threat (Zelenskiy’s election is no more a permanent blow against antisemitism than Obama’s was against racism in America, as Trump proved.) However tempting it may be to call him “Ukraine’s Trump,” he didn’t campaign on cruelty and there’s no reason to think he’ll govern that way. But in a campaign more marked by buffoonish performance acts on both sides, the actual future of Ukraine is a giant question mark.
