Ukraine’s voters likely to elect a comedian as next president
KIEV, Ukraine — Zoya Troshina said she plans to vote for a comedian for president Sunday because she wants peace in her country.
“At any price,” the 69year-old retired engineer added.
The comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, is the front-runner against incumbent Petro Poroshenko in Sunday’s runoff election, putting Ukraine on the cusp of becoming the latest nation to cast its future with an untested outsider.
Driving Zelensky’s surge is voter disdain for Poroshenko, president since 2014, and widespread fatigue with the war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Zelensky, 41, offers few policy specifics but the promise of a fresh start and the fantasy of the perfectly incorruptible leader whom he plays on
TV.
Polls have predicted a landslide for Zelensky, a star whose popular sitcom, “Servant of the People,” features Zelensky as a schoolteacher turned righteous president of Ukraine. His entertainment-driven campaign reached its apex Friday as he debated Poroshenko in a 70,000seat stadium in Kiev — a spectacle proposed by Zelensky.
“Why hasn’t the war ended yet?” Zelensky shot across the stadium stage to Poroshenko. “That’s the kind of commander in chief you are.”
A survey published this week by Rating, a Ukrainian polling firm, showed Zelensky leading Poroshenko 58 percent to 22 percent among those planning to cast a ballot Sunday, with 20 percent undecided.
Other recent polls have shown Zelensky with a similar margin, while Poroshenko’s standing has been dragged down by the war, corruption scandals and a struggling economy.
“I want change,” said actress Yana Kozak, 48, a Zelensky supporter in Zaporizhia, an industrial city that is a few hours’ drive from the front line in eastern Ukraine. “I want the thieves to be punished and the war to be stopped.”
Zelensky has no political experience — other than what has been scripted in his show. Its third season, which began airing last month, includes scenes of an imagined future Ukraine in the aftermath of the Zelensky character’s presidency, a country prosperous and free of corruption.
Zelensky has relied on his TV shows and Instagram account to reach voters, investing little in traditional advertising and largely avoiding unscripted interactions with journalists.
That 21st-century campaign culminated in Kiev’s Olympic Stadium on Friday. Zelensky had challenged Poroshenko to the stadium debate — rather than a traditional one in a television studio — in a video posted to social media after taking first place in the first round of the presidential election last month.
“I’m not a politician,” Zelensky said in the stadium debate, channeling his character in his show. “I’m just a simple person who came to break the system.”
Poroshenko painted Zelensky as a slick entertainer who is a tool of the emigre Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, who controls the television channel that airs Zelensky’s show.
“You didn’t come here by tram and not even by bicycle,” Poroshenko told Zelensky, in a dig at his TV character, who prefers humble modes of transportation. “You are the main conduit for oligarchs and certainly of one fugitive oligarch.”
While Zelensky blamed Poroshenko for the war, the incumbent said true responsibility lay with “Putin, the Russian army and Russian aggression.”
Moscow annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and backed a separatist war.