Ukrainian voters purge oligarchs from parliament

Ukrainian voters finally had enough.

Frustrated at a parliament stacked with millionaire businessmen, they backed little-known candidates from all walks of life — including a wedding photographer, a fitness-club director, an anesthesiologist and more than a dozen without stable work — to unexpectedly hand an antiestablishment party the country’s first-ever ruling majority.

Servant of the People, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, clinched more than 226 seats in Sunday’s election on a pledge to crack down on endemic corruption, fix the economy and end a half-decade-long conflict with Russian-backed separatists. Like Zelenskiy, a former comedian, many of the party’s members had no political experience before scoring a series of shock victories in Sunday’s snap vote.

The sweep deals a blow to the array of oligarchs, celebrities and politicians’ relatives who’ve traditionally piled into parliament in the almost three decades since the fall of communism. Armed with their own agendas, they’ve complicated governments’ efforts to enact policies. Zelenskiy has pledged to revoke automatic immunity from prosecution for lawmakers, a perk pro-democracy activists say had filled the assembly with figures whose main motive was to avoid jail.

“The voters’ choices were more emotional than rational,” Viktor Zamyatin, an analyst at the Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies in Kiev, said by phone Tuesday. “In many cases, people didn’t know the electoral programs, or even the candidates at all. But they hope the new faces will be able to make changes for better.”

In one of the most highprofile upsets, 45-year-old mining billionaire Kostyantin Zhevago, who enjoys significant influence in regions where his plants provide thousands of jobs, lost to a 25-year-old civil servant focusing on fighting corruption in state procurement. In the southeastern Zaporizhzhya region, 29-year-old Serhiy Shtepa, a wedding photographer, defeated 80-year-old millionaire Vyacheslav Boguslayev, the owner of engine maker Motor Sich.

Most of the upsets were delivered by candidates affiliated with Servant of the People, which was named after the television show that catapulted Zelenskiy to the national stage. He played a high-school history teacher thrust into the position of head of state.