PHOTO: Pacific Press | LightRocket | Getty Images
Volodymyr Zelensky, candidate for the post of President of Ukraine during the concert program of the studio 'Kvartal 95'.
Out of 39 presidential candidates, a comedian with a popular anti-corruption message took the lead in the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election on March 31 according to exit polls.
Volodymyr Zelensky, 41, plays a fictional president in a TV show called “Servant of the People”. In the TV series, Zelensky plans a schoolteacher who unexpectedly becomes President of Ukraine after becoming famous for an anti-corruption rant that goes viral on social media. In a quixotic political bid that foreshadows the plot of the series, Zelensky received 30.4% of the votes according to exit polls posted by Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform.
Incumbent President Poroshenko, who has been power since the 2014 Maidan street protests, appears likely to move onto the second round with 17.8% of the votes in early exit polling. To this announcement, he said “I critically and soberly understand the signal that society gave today to the acting authorities” and accepted the projected results.
Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko who carried 14.2% of votes disputed the exit poll results, and urged others not to consider the survey as the ultimate truth.
Ukraine's Central Election Commission (CEC) is expected to announce preliminary results overnight on Monday. It said the voter turnout stood at 63.4 percent. The decisive runoff between the top two candidates will take place on April 21.
President Poroshenko has stepped up his campaign based on a patriotic and national-security platform, pushing the use of the Ukrainian language and welcoming the establishment of a new independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. However, frustration over low living standards, pervasive corruption, and ongoing conflict in the eastern Donbass region despite Poroshenko’s promise to end it within weeks has left the door open for Zelensky. According to a Gallup poll published in March, just 9% of Ukrainians have confidence in their national government.
Zelensky has tapped into this anti-establishment mood, although his inexperience makes Western officials and foreign investors wary, and skeptics question his fitness to be a wartime commander-in-chief. He does not have a clear political platform, except that he will stand by the Minsk Agreement, and add United Kingdom and United States to the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum.
The Minsk Agreement (also known as Minsk II) was signed by France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia, and the signatories agreed to secure truce in the country’s east between the rebels and the Ukrainian army. The Minsk Agreement serves as the basis of sanctions against Russia.
Both Zelensky and Poroshenko are pro-EU and pro-NATO, but Zekelsnky said that Ukraine would only hold a referendum on these issues only when the chance of accession is realistic.
BY MSEAP Cyber Secretariat (mseap@assembly.go.kr) |
