Volodymyr Zelensky: front-runner seeking Ukraine presidency is a comedian who plays one on TV
- Volodymyr Zelensky has brought an element of surprise into Ukraine’s presidential race
- The 41-year-old comedian’s only previous political experience has been playing the country’s president in a television show
In the second season of the Ukrainian hit TV show Servant of the People, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky plays a schoolteacher turned presidential candidate who shoots to the top of the polls amid voter disgust with the political establishment.
Zelensky is now running for president in real life.
With just weeks to go until Ukraine’s March 31 election, he has shot to the top of the polls amid – like in the show – voter disgust with the political establishment.
And just to blur the lines even more: his party is called Servant of the People.
“People are voting for the plot of the show,” said Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko. “They want to bring the plot of the show to life.”
As Ukraine’s deadly conflict with Russian-backed separatists drags on, a 41-year-old comedian with no political experience is increasingly a favourite to take over as its commander in chief.
The reason? Five years after the country’s pro-Western revolution, its people still thirst for change.
Street protests in 2014 marked a decisive turn away from Moscow, but they did far less to modernise the economy or root out corruption.
President Petro Poroshenko’s government and administration have been beset by infighting and state spending scandals.
The economy, suffering from weak investor confidence and the war in the heavily industrial east, still hasn’t recovered from its near-collapse five years ago.
The most prominent candidates heading into the election campaign represented the old guard: the incumbent Poroshenko, who is also a chocolate tycoon and one of Ukraine’s richest men, and the former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko.
But for them, things have not gone according to plan.
Zelensky, who declared his candidacy on national television on the New Year’s Eve edition of his variety show, has led both Tymoshenko and Poroshenko in almost every published poll since early February.
The building disbelief among Ukraine’s political class echoes the furor of the establishment as Zelensky’s character rises in the polls in Servant of the People.
Voting for Zelensky for president, Tymoshenko told a Ukrainian interviewer recently, was like making the beet soup borscht out of Cheburashka, a Soviet-era cartoon character.
“This is a sort of experiment, but it’s certainly not tasty,” Tymoshenko said.
In Servant of the People, which premiered in 2015, the schoolteacher played by Zelensky becomes an overnight sensation after his impromptu rant against government corruption goes viral.
He’s elected president and goes on to fight the entrenched elites, refusing to be bought.
In Season 2, which started airing in late 2017, Zelensky’s character resigns as president after facing down the International Monetary Fund and then stages an improbable, underdog re-election campaign.
“We’re living in a parallel universe,” said a senior Western diplomat in Kiev who, like many colleagues, has been catching up on the show.
This isn’t in the movies, it’s real life, but I really do want to help Ukraine
“People are confusing what’s real and what’s fiction.”
Coming in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s election and the success of comedian Beppe Grillo’s populist Five Star movement in Italy, Zelensky’s rise echoes that of other outsiders storming into politics.
But it is possible that no recent presidential campaign has featured such a head-spinning blend of fact and fiction.
But Zelensky’s true politics are a mystery.
He says he’s in favour of Ukraine seeking to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the European Union, but that the moves should be endorsed by the public in a referendum. He says he’s ready to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in eastern Ukraine, but he’s offered few specifics on how he’d accomplishing that without ceding any territory to Russia for good.
He insists that all of Ukraine’s powerful oligarchs will be equal before the courts. But critics doubt the same will go for Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the billionaire rival of Poroshenko who owns the channel that aired Zelensky’s show.
“It’s extremely difficult right now to say what kind of a president he’ll be,” said the analyst Fesenko.
“I think he himself doesn’t know what his politics will be.”
Zelensky asked his 2.8 million Instagram followers recently to send him their picks for prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister, and even security service chief and prosecutor general.
“This isn’t in the movies, it’s real life, but I really do want to help Ukraine … I want to help our people,” Zelensky said in an interview with AFP last week.
“If people believe in me and I want it myself, then maybe I can change something,” he said.
“At the very least, I can bring as many decent new people as possible into politics.”
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
