The beginning of the year in Ukraine may have been cold weatherwise, but it had some hot political news.
Candidates register
Although many candidates in the March 31, 2019, presidential race started their unofficial campaigns months ago, the race started officially on Dec. 31, exactly three months before the voting.
The Central Election Commission started registering candidates and will continue until Feb. 3. After that, the commission has to announce the final list of candidates by Feb. 8.
Previously, more than 20 people announced they wanted to run. But as of the afternoon of Jan. 10, only five candidates were registered, according to the election commission’s website.
They were: ex-lawyer Ihor Shevchenko, who served as ecology minister in 2014–2015 and had to leave after being accused of accepting a bribe from the scandalous businessman Oleksandr Onyshchenko in the form of a ride on a private jet; lawmaker Serhiy Kaplin, who heads the Social-Democrat Party and is known for his populist stance; Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a former diplomat who ran the Security Service of Ukraine in 2014–2015; Andriy Sadoviy, the mayor of Lviv and head of the Samopomich party that has 25 seats in parliament; and Vitaly Skotsyk, a former head of the Agrarian Party of Ukraine.
None of the top candidates in the polls have registered yet, Some are planning to do so after party conventions later in January. These include ex-Prime Minister and Batkivshchyna party leader Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been leading the polls almost invariably for months.
President Petro Poroshenko has yet to formally announce his bid for re-election.
Latest polls
The latest presidential poll was conducted in December and released on Jan. 3 by a Kyiv-based polling center Oleksandr Yaremnko Ukraine Institute for Social Research.
Tymoshenko led it with a moderate result of 13.4 percent, followed by a showman Volodymyr Zelenskiy with 10.8 percent. Other leaders were Yuriy Boyko, a lawmaker and a candidate from the pro-Russian Opposition Platform — Za Zhyttya party, with 8.5 percent, ex-Defense Minister Anatoly Grytsenko with 8.1 percent, and Poroshenko with 7.7 percent.
But like the previous polls, this one shows there is space for a drastic change. More than 13 percent of the respondents said they are yet undecided about the candidate — the number almost equal to the support of the poll’s leader, Tymoshenko.
The poll was conducted before one big news bomb dropped at the end of December — before Zelenskiy officially announced his candidacy.
Zelenskiy and ‘team Ze’
Ukraine’s top showman, comedian actor and producer Zelenskiy announced he was running for president on the first day of the campaign, on Dec. 31.
He did it in the most public way imaginable: Zelenskiy’s announcement was rolled on 1+1 TV channel minutes before the midnight of Dec. 31, brazenly replacing the traditional end-of-the-year address by the president.
Zelenskiy, who has never been in politics but is arguably one of the most recognized celebrities in Ukraine thanks to his massive TV presence, was rumored to consider running for president for nearly a year. His name appeared in the polls, and he himself joked about running.
One of Zelenskiy’s most popular roles in recent years has been the role of the president of Ukraine in the comedy series “Servant of the People.” His appealing character is a high school teacher who happens to become president and tries to rule Ukraine “the right way” — end the corruption and put people’s interests first. The third season premiers in March, the same month as the election.
Following the announcement, Zelenskiy started recruiting supporters online, labeling them “Team Ze,” and asked them to post their suggestions for his presidential campaign.
Now that the mystery of whether Zelenskiy will indeed run is solved, another other one stands up: why does he run and who backs him.
Zelenskiy works with 1+1, the channel owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and was spotted visiting the oligarch’s birthday party in Switzerland in 2018. This led to a popular opinion that Zelenskiy’s campaign is a scheme by Kolomoisky, who has been in vehement opposition to Poroshenko since Ukrainian central bank nationalized the troubled PrivatBank, which Kolomoisky owned with and his business partner Gennady Bogolyubov, in December 2016.
Zelenskiy said in a December interview he had only a business relationship with Kolomoisky, through the 1+1 TV channel. When Ukrainian journalist Sonya Koshkina asked Kolomoisky in November whether he influenced Zelenskiy, the oligarch replied with a joke.
Zelenskiy’s candidacy might indeed hurt Poroshenko, and not only because he can chop off some of his votes.
According to the polls, Poroshenko might have a very hard time winning in the runoff. His best chance is to get in the runoff with a pro-Russian candidate like Boyko. Zelenskiy can be an obstacle to it: a Russian-speaking native of Dnipro Oblast, he would have strong support of the eastern and central Ukraine, hurting candidates like Boyko.
Sociologist Iryna Bekeshkina, director of the Democratic Initiatives Fund, said the high support of Zelenskiy came as a result of the Ukrainians’ disappointment in politicians and their hunger for new faces in politics.
“It’s their reaction — let it be anyone, even Zelenskiy, but not you,” Bekeshkina said on air of Hromadske TV on Jan. 8.
Will he or won’t he?
The joker card of this election is Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the 43-year-old leader of Okean Elzy, Ukraine’s most popular band.
Like Zelenskiy, Vakarchuk has been rumored to consider running for president. The musician isn’t new to politics: he sat in parliament in 2007–2008 on then-President Viktor Yushchenko’s party ballot. He left the parliament voluntarily, saying that it mired in arguments and failed.
In the recent years, Vakarchuk has again shown interest in politics and democracy, having taken leadership fellowships in Western universities and giving lectures about subjects like rule of law and the future of Ukraine.
But no word on presidency yet.
Vakarchuk has time until Feb. 3 to decide whether he is running.
Vakarchuk and his band will have a charity concert in Kyiv on Jan. 21 to benefit the families of the Ukrainian soldiers killed in Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine. Some expect him to use this occasion for the big announcement — just like earlier they anticipated he would do it at the band’s big Independence Day stadium show in August 2018. Perhaps, this boosted the ticket sales: the expensive tickets, ranging from Hr 1,000 to Hr 28,000, are nearly sold out.
Religion card
President Poroshenko, who is yet to announce his bid for re-election but is widely believed to be running, had a mixed start of the year.
While Zelenskiy entering the race is bad news for Poroshenko, it was followed by a major PR victory for the incumbent president.
On Jan. 6, Poroshenko and a Ukrainian delegation went to Istanbul to ceremonially receive a decree pronouncing Ukraine’s church independent from the Russian church, ending a 300-year-long subservience.
In 2018, Poroshenko made the fight for the church independence a central point of his promo campaign, running under the slogan “Army. Language. Faith,” appealing to conservative patriots.
Poroshenko made sure to squeeze maximum publicity out of the proclamation of the church independence. Despite the fact that Ukraine by its Constitution is a secular state, the president appeared at the Ukrainian church unification council at the end of December, where he sat at the table surrounded by priests. After that, he commissioned numerous billboards celebrating the church unification — signed by his name.
January polls will show if it helped Poroshenko’s rating.
