After the comedian became president

October 25: Ukraine local elections
(Votes not fully tallied)

Last year, President Volodymyr Zelensky sailed to victory with a campaign high on lofty promises – such as wiping away corruption and ending the war with Russian-backed separatists – but low on coherent policy. Seeking a new hero after five years of establishment rule, Ukrainians placed their trust in Zelensky, a TV star and comedian. He had a widely recognizable brand—his party was named “Servant of the People” (SoP) after his hit television show about a history teacher who goes viral and unexpectedly becomes president of Ukraine. Just like on television, he had virtually no political experience.

Fast forward less than a year-and-half, and at least some of the shine appears to have worn off. The Zelensky administration has failed to make meaningful strides at tackling corruption; in fact, earlier this year the SoP-controlled parliament dismissed a widely respected Prosecutor General known for tackling graft inside his agency. And while he succeeded in completing several rounds of prisoner exchange with Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine, Zelensky has made no other significant diplomatic breakthrough. Crimea remains firmly in Russia’s grasp. The Ukrainian economy, though not decimated by the coronavirus pandemic, is projected to have contracted 6.5 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2020, according to the World Bank. Outward signs of trouble have yet to manifest; like many others, Ukrainians have been eager to return to normal—though mostly unmasked—after two months of quarantine.

The SoP’s lack of high-profile wins in the October 25 local elections, a series of municipal and regional council and mayoral races in districts around the country that was seen as a bellwether for Zelensky’s party’s overall strength nationwide, marks the end of a political experiment. (The results are still being verified, so analysis has been based on exit polls.) Despite highly visible campaigns (during which, the Committee of Voters of Ukraine watchdog said, Zelensky improperly used official visits to stump for the party) none of SoP’s candidates won a single major mayoral race in Kyiv, Dnipro, Odessa or Kharkiv, the country’s major cities. Nor did any of them make it to a second-round run-off in those places. The party’s candidate in Kyiv suffered a particularly tough defeat, receiving merely 8 percent compared to incumbent Mayor Vitaly Klitschko’s 47 percent. “Zelensky Lost Everything,” declared an editor at Ukraine's leading newsweekly.

Another indicator of the political malaise was the dismal 37 percent turnout rate — around 10 percent lower than it was five years ago. Election officials attributed that to the coronavirus pandemic, which is currently surging by about 6,000 to 7,000 new cases per day, though it’s safe to assume discontent with the ruling government was also a factor.

The president’s critics haven’t held back: opposition lawmaker Iryna Gerashchenko, from ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity Party, boasted on Facebook that SoP’s “shameful defeat” in local elections would lead to its “disintegration” in parliament (early parliamentary elections may be called as soon as this year or next). That may be true, but Zelensky’s political foes shouldn’t celebrate quite yet, as the party claimed it’s on track to take more seats in regional councils than any other single party. To be sure, it’ll remain a presence on a local level throughout the country — but likely nowhere near the 43 percent it commanded in last year’s parliamentary elections.

Rather than a stunning defeat, SoP’s lackluster performance represents a reset of a political landscape that was upended by the Zelensky phenomenon last year, writes Petro Oleshchuk, a political scientist at Kyiv’s Shevchenko University. The party’s rise to power was an unprecedented rebuke of politics as usual, and although his administration wasn’t a catastrophic failure, it also failed to deliver the magic that voters expected. “Now,” Oleshchuk says, “the system is returning to its typical form.” That likely means a fractured playing field involving parties with regionally-focused support bases, such as the pro-Russian Opposition Platform—For Life, or those competing for similar swaths of voters, such as Poroshenko’s party and the upstart liberal Voice party founded by rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk. It also suggests that the political polarization that has long marked Ukrainian politics is still alive and well. 

Sunday’s vote represented another political landmark. These were the first local elections since Ukraine launched a sprawling decentralization campaign following the 2014 Maidan revolution to devolve more power to localities across the country. Overhauling Ukraine’s clunky bureaucracy and introducing more localized rule was a key demand by civil society leaders. Now, the victors in the countless lesser-seen local races outside the regional centers will have more agency than ever before, particularly when it comes to collecting and redistributing taxes to fix the dilapidated roads, schools and hospitals that are all but ubiquitous outside major cities.

Empowering hundreds of newly-created “amalgamated territorial communities” (ATC), in addition to existing towns and cities, to more closely manage their affairs may seem an unsexy reform. But it’s a major change for a former Soviet republic run for decades through a clunky administrative system in which a centralized and often corrupt Kyiv administration mostly called the shots. It’s also important for the vast majority of taxpayers, who don’t see where their money is currently being spent, says Andriy Andrushkiv, director of the Center of United Actions, a Kyiv-based NGO.

Whether Ukrainians will come to appreciate this newfound agency, the results of which will be felt more acutely following these elections, is another matter. Consider the fact that more than 70 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology — yet only half that number shows up to vote in local elections. “Unfortunately, most Ukrainians think that local problems should be solved by the president,” Nara Narimanova, who works at a nonprofit promoting civil society, told me in a video chat.

Zelensky played into that leader-decides-all sentiment by instating a non-official and non-binding five-question poll just outside polling stations across the country. It asked, among other things, whether Ukrainians support the legalization of medical marijuana and lifetime prison sentences for corruption. Widely panned by observers as a political stunt to curry favor with voters, it became something of a joke, as anyone could vote by dropping their “ballot” into a cardboard box (multiple times, even) in a peculiar populist exercise that carried no legal weight.

The last few years in Ukraine have amounted to something of a roller coaster ride: from the euphoria of a democratic revolution to disappointment over the mixed results achieved by the elites it swept to power—then excitement around an insurgent candidate, followed by a return to disappointment. After Sunday’s vote, one thing is clear: Ukrainian voters appear to believe that Zelensky and his party aren't capable of delivering on the sweeping changes they promised. Can anyone?