Matthias Williams -
When the Ukrainian president played by actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy faces a corrupt parliament in his TV comedy, he fantasises about blasting them all away with two submachine guns.
Now that Zelenskiy has been elected president in real life, Margarita Bulava, who voted for him, hopes he will have a similarly transformative effect on the country’s politics.
One of Zelenskiy’s biggest challenges will be meeting the expectations of voters like 28-year-old event hostess Bulava, who had never voted before last Sunday’s presidential election. Now she has an ambitious wish-list. There should be no inflation. People like her mother, who works in a laundry in Poland, should stop needing to move abroad for better paid jobs. There should be peace with Russia. Wages should be higher, and pensioners should be able to afford their heating bills without having to sell flowers in the subway.
“It’s a huge plus that he has never been in politics because he is completely from another sphere. He sees the situation in the country through the eyes of the people,” said Bulava.
But what if the new president fails to deliver? “It’s very scary if really none of this succeeds because expectations are really very big and everyone believes that something really should happen,” she said after working out at her gym in Kiev.
A comedian and actor with no prior political experience, Zelenskiy, 41, beat incumbent Petro Poroshenko by a landslide, promising change to a country at war with Russian-backed forces and facing some of the worst poverty in Europe.
In a wildly successful election campaign, Zelenskiy remained vague on some key policy questions, trading on the image of the honest everyman he plays on TV: a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president after a rant about corruption filmed by one of his students goes viral. But his outsider status may hamper his ability to deliver on his promises, especially early in his presidency when he has no lawmakers representing his party in parliament.
And if he disappoints voters early on, that could make the problem worse, hurting his new party’s prospects going into October parliamentary elections that will determine the make-up of the cabinet with which he must share power.
Zelenskiy’s vague positions on the campaign trail won him support from a wide array of voters who wanted to see new faces in politics. But that makes his popularity “fragile”, said Agnese Ortolani, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. His support “could dissipate quickly when it comes to making decisions that could alienate part of his constituency,” Ortolani said. — Reuters
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