Last year, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his party were triumphant, winning presidential and parliamentary elections in a landslide.
A comedian without political experience, Zelensky was elected as an “anti-politician,” part of a popular rebellion against the traditional political elite. He was given a broad mandate to put an end to business as usual, including Ukraine’s omnipresent corruption.
But since then, the ratings of Zelensky and his party have plummeted as the political status quo failed to change. No top officials have been jailed for corruption, and the state apparatus remains as unreformed as before.
Another reason for the falling ratings is the deteriorating economic situation amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said that people “believed in the dream and change associated with Zelensky.”
“With this enormous trust, Zelensky could have carried out inconvenient reforms over the past year while maintaining his approval rating,” she told the Kyiv Post. “Unfortunately, he was either afraid of inconvenient reforms or couldn’t realize what reforms are and how the state apparatus works.”
Given this trend, the results of Zelensky’s party may be quite modest in the upcoming Oct. 25 local elections.
The President’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Zelensky defended his record in an Oct. 12 interview with the BBC, boasting about the achievements of the early months of his presidency and saying he still has time to deliver on his promises before the end of his term.
Falling ratings
Zelensky received 73% of the vote in the presidential run-off on April 21, 2019, and his party got 58% of the Rada’s seats on July 21, 2019, becoming the first single-party majority in Ukraine’s independent history. Zelensky’s approval rating hit a high of 70% in September 2019.
Since then, the ratings have dropped substantially.
According to a Sept. 16 poll by Rating Group, 57% of respondents disapproved of Zelensky’s performance, while 35% approved.
In the Oct. 25 local elections, Zelensky’s Servant of the People is expected to get 16.7% on average nationwide, while the pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party is projected to receive 13.5% and European Solidarity will poll at 13.2%, according to an Oct. 20 poll by Rating Group.
In the big cities, the situation is even worse for Zelensky’s party: None of its candidates is expected to be elected mayor in Ukraine’s biggest cities — Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa and Dnipro — according to opinion polls.
Zelensky’s party is not going to be elected to the Lviv city council and may or may not pass the 5 percent threshold in Kharkiv, polls show. It will get around 12-13% in Kyiv, Dnipro and Odesa.
Presidential honeymoon
During his first months in office, Zelensky maintained his sky-high rating by acting rapidly and decisively in a populist way, political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Post.
“It worked then, and there was a lot of hype and drive,” he added.
Zelensky kept his popularity by publicly lashing out at bureaucrats and appointing an early parliamentary election to replace the discredited Verkhovna Rada. He also rapidly pushed through the new parliament laws on judicial reform, reinstating the law penalizing illicit enrichment and stripping lawmakers of immunity.
Reasons for the drop
But later, this drive was gone, and voters became disillusioned with Zelensky as his promises to fight corruption, carry out rapid reforms, bring peace and improve the economic situation failed to materialize.
One of the reasons for the drop in Zelensky’s ratings is his lack of decisive action in 2020, Fesenko said.
Despite Zelensky’s campaign promise “springtime – jailtime,” a reference to the jailing of corrupt officials, no top officials have been imprisoned during Zelensky’s almost one and a half years in office.
Moreover, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova has tried to block corruption charges against Judge Pavlo Vovk and two lawmakers from Zelensky’s party — Pavlo Khalimon and Oleksandr Yurchenko.
Zelensky has also failed to react to credible corruption accusations against his Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and kept them on their jobs. They deny the accusations of wrongdoing.
Voters increasingly think that Zelensky is just maintaining the status quo and business as usual, and he is turning from an anti-elite rebel into a traditional politician — an image against which the electorate revolted in 2019, according to Fesenko.
“His promises have exploded like a soap bubble,” Kaleniuk said. “Especially his promise to deliver justice. The courts have not been reformed, the prosecutor general is an unprofessional presidential loyalist, it’s unclear what’s going on with the war and the president is surrounded by populists and ignoramuses. Meanwhile, oligarchs and bandits have bought a major part of the Servant of the People (party).”
COVID crisis
Another reason for the falling rating is the coronavirus crisis — both the pandemic itself and the economic consequences of the lockdown, Fesenko and political analyst Vitaly Bala said.
Bala argued that Zelensky’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis leaves much to be desired, as financial compensation for the lockdowns has been meager and the authorities have failed to contain the spread of the disease effectively. The COVID-19 restrictions have been unpopular, with many siding with populist mayors who have opposed the lockdowns.
The coronavirus crisis has already contributed to protests against the killing of African-American George Floyd by a police officer in May — the biggest in the United States since the mid-20th century — as well as to the ongoing largest protests in the history of Belarus, a revolution in Kyrgyzstan and unprecedented protests in Russia’s Khabarovsk Krai.
Restoring former drive?
Now Zelensky is resorting to populist measures and PR stunts to boost his party’s ratings in the run-up to the Oct. 25 local elections and is playing with direct democracy, according to Fesenko.
Zelensky has initiated a nationwide poll consisting of five questions in what analysts saw as an effort to boost his party’s popularity ahead of the local elections. The poll is not a real referendum and has an advisory nature, and its legality has been disputed.
Specifically, voters will be asked whether they support life imprisonment for corruption, creating a free economic zone in the Donbas, reducing the number of lawmakers and legalizing medical cannabis. Finally, they will answer a vaguely worded question that appears to propose including the United States and the United Kingdom in peace negotiations over the Donbas, which Russia has occupied since 2014.
In an hour-long address to lawmakers on Oct. 20, Zelensky boasted about his administration’s accomplishments, lambasted critics and made more promises to the public.
“Now he is trying to restore his former drive by initiating the poll and producing video addresses,” Fesenko said.
No more unity
Ukraine’s electoral map has traditionally been split between the pro-European west and the pro-Russian east.
Zelensky and his party managed to overcome this split in the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, uniting the whole country.
In the first round of the presidential election on March 31, 2019, Zelensky won in all regions except for three westernmost ones, where ex-President Petro Poroshenko and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko were the winners, and two regions of the Donbas in the east, where pro-Russian candidate Yuriy Boyko won. In the April 21, 2019 run-off, Zelensky swept all the regions except for Lviv Oblast.
But now this traditional split between west and east appears to be back with a vengeance as Zelensky’s pro-Russian voters are switching to the Opposition Platform -For Life, and his pro-European and nationalist voters are supporting a number of other parties: Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, populist Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party and Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy’s Samopomich.
Poroshenko, who represents nationalist and pro-European voters, has also strengthened his position by becoming the main critic of Zelensky and scoring points due to the president’s falling ratings, Fesenko said.
This polarization is the most evident in Lviv, where Servant of the People ranks seventh with a mere 3.4%, while the party’s mayoral candidate Taras Klyofa trails behind in ninth place with 1.6%, according to an Oct. 19 Fama agency poll. Pro-European Mayor Sadovy is the leading mayoral candidate with a 41.5% rating, while Poroshenko’s European Solidarity is the most popular party with 29.4%.
In Mariupol in eastern Donetsk Oblast, Mayor Vadym Boichenko’s pro-Russian party and the pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party are polling at 55.2% and 23.3%, respectively, and the Servant of the People is barely passing the election threshold with 5.7%, according to a Sept. 28 Rating Group poll. Boichenko is the undisputed leader among mayoral candidates with 72.4%, and Servant of the People has not even fielded a mayoral candidate.
Not an exception
Zelensky’s falling popularity is not an exception to the general rule of Ukrainian politics.
“This was inevitable,” Fesenko said. “The rating of all presidents fell after the honeymoon.”
Poroshenko, who was elected with 54.7% in 2014, had an approval rating of 32% and a disapproval rating of 61% a year later. He ended his presidency with a 70% disapproval rating and a mere 15.9% in the first round of the presidential election in 2019.
Ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected with 49% in 2010, had an approval rating of 24% and a disapproval rating of 67% a year later. He was polling at 29% before he was ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.
Viktor Yushchenko had the most disappointing polls: He was elected president with 52% in 2004 and got a mere 5.5% in the 2010 presidential election.
However, Zelensky is still different from his predecessors because, unlike them, he was seen as the “anti-politician” and the epitome of the anti-elite protest electorate.
This is why his initial rating was abnormally high and has been falling at a slower rate than those of his predecessors, according to Fesenko.
The only way to change this negative trend for Zelensky is to take a more decisive and proactive approach and adopt populist measures, as well as ones favorable to business, such as tax cuts and other incentives, Fesenko said.
