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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Comedian’s win in Ukraine election poses a riddle

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Andrew Osborn and Matthias Williams -


Ukraine entered uncharted political waters on Monday after near final results showed a comedian with no political experience and few detailed policies had dramatically up-ended the status quo and won the country’s presidential election by a landslide.


The emphatic victory of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, 41, is a bitter blow for incumbent Petro Poroshenko and presents a riddle for investors, the West and Russia who wonder what approach he will take on everything from Moscow to the domestic banking sector.


Zelenskiy is poised to take leadership of a country on the frontline of the West’s standoff with Russia following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and support for a pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine.


Poroshenko, 53, had tried to rally voters, casting himself as a bulwark against Russian aggression and a champion of Ukrainian identity. But Zelenskiy, best known for playing a fictitious president in a TV show, trounced him, winning 73 per cent of the vote, central election commission data showed after 99 per cent of votes were counted. Oleksiy Kondrashov, a public sector utilities worker in Kiev, said the election was not an endorsement of Zelenskiy but a protest vote against Poroshenko whose pledges, such as promising to stamp out corruption, came to nothing.


“Everyone was not voting for Zelenskiy, but against Poroshenko. If someone else had made it to the second round, people would have voted for them instead,” said Kondrashov.


Declaring victory to emotional supporters at his campaign headquarters on Sunday night, Zelenskiy promised he would not let Ukrainian people down.


“I’m not yet officially the president, but as a citizen of Ukraine, I can say to all countries in the post-Soviet Union look at us. Anything is possible!” Zelenskiy, the latest anti-establishment figure to unseat an incumbent, both in Europe and further afield, has promised to end the war in the eastern Donbass region and to root out corruption amid widespread dismay over rising prices and sliding living standards.


But he has been coy about exactly how he plans to achieve all that and investors want reassurances that he will accelerate reforms needed to attract foreign investment and keep the country in a multi-billion dollar International Monetary Fund programme.


“Since there is complete uncertainty about the economic policy of the person who will become president, we simply don’t know what is going to happen and that worries the financial community,” said Serhiy Fursa, an investment banker at Dragon Capital in Kiev. In a system where parliament calls many of the shots, Zelenskiy could struggle to get lawmakers’ approval for new policies. — Reuters


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