Ukrainians are urging President Petro Poroshenko and comedic actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the two candidates that made it into the presidential election runoff on April 21, to meet face to face for a debate.
Although the Ukrainian legislation prescribes that presidential candidates should debate before a runoff, it has no punishment for avoiding the debate, and has been largely ignored.
The last time presidential frontrunners had a debate was in 2004, when candidates Victor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych debated on TV.
Ukrainian public broadcaster UA Pershiy held a series of debates for presidential candidates before the March 31 first round of the election, but many candidates ignored invitations to participate – including Poroshenko and Zelenskiy.
But after Zelenskiy won the first round of the election with 30 percent of the votes, and Poroshenko followed him into the runoff with nearly 16 percent, people started demanding that the two have a real debate.
On social media, a flash mob is running under a Cyrillic hashtag #Хочубачитидебати (Khochu bachyty debaty, meaning “I want to see debates”).
“As a voter, I want to hear what a person who is going to speak on behalf of the country thinks, how they respond, argue. We have the right. Join in and demand this,” wrote Oleksandra Koltsova, a top manager at the public broadcaster that would organize the debate, who initiated the flash mob.
But it seems that the two candidates can’t agree on how the debate should happen.
Poroshenko challenged Zelenskiy to a debate on March 31, after learning from exit polls that the two of them were going into the runoff. Two days later, members of his faction in parliament registered a bill to make debates mandatory for presidential candidates. A petition on the parliament website was launched on April 2, also demanding to make debates mandatory.
But Zelenskiy’s campaign has something different in mind.
On April 3, the campaign published a video where Zelenskiy accepts Poroshenko’s challenge to debate him – but under several conditions.
Zelenskiy said he wants the debate to take place on NSC Olimpyiskiy, the country’s biggest sports arena, for “the people of Ukraine to see it.” Other conditions are: all TV channels can broadcast the debate live, any journalists are allowed in, candidates must pass a medical check for alcohol and drug addictions. Also, Zelenskiy demanded that Poroshenko publicly said that “he would debate not a puppet, a clown, a bumpkin, but a presidential candidate, Volodymyr Zelenskiy,” referring to some of the names Poroshenko’s supporters and associates called him.
The last demand was also a response to Poroshenko himself referring to Zelenskiy earlier as “a puppet of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.” Zelenskiy and Kolomoisky have various connections, including through business and people in Zelenskiy’s campaign, but both denied that Zelenskiy was Kolomoisky’s proxy.
Zelenskiy’s upbeat video immediately went viral, gaining 750,000 views and 50,000 shares on Facebook in the first two hours.
While Poroshenko is yet to respond, a lawmaker from his faction Maria Ionova said that the president wouldn’t go for these conditions.
“Poroshenko is a European, he won’t debate on a stadium,” Ionova told Hromadske news media, adding that he’d rather do it in a TV studio.
According to legislation, the debates are to be held live on TV on Friday before the second round of the elections, which means April 19.
Earlier, Zelenskiy’s campaign advisors made it look like the front-runner wasn’t eager to debate Poroshenko. Zelenskiy’s advisor Ruslan Riaboshapka said on April 2 that he didn’t know what Zelenskiy could be talking about with Poroshenko because the president “had five years to say what he wanted.”
In the past, Poroshenko wasn’t so eager to debate his opponents.
Apart from ditching the debate prior to the March 31 first round of the election, he also refused to debate during the previous election.
In 2014, then-candidate Poroshenko refused to debate with his main rival Yulia Tymoshenko, as he did not want “to arrange dog fights, in such conditions when there is war in Ukraine.”
The Kyiv Post’s 2019 presidential election coverage can be found here.
