Fiction blurs into fact in Ukraine's presidency race
The FT's Ben Hall hears what voters expect from the three main candidates, including anti-establishment TV comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, who has carved out a lead in the opinion polls
Produced and filmed by Roman Olearchyk, Edited by Jamie Han, Additional footage :Reuters, Photos:AP/Reuters
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Ukrainians go to the polls on Sunday in what is the most unpredictable and most unconventional presidential election since the country became independent in 1991. The race has been electrified by the surge in support for Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and TV star with no political experience and only a sketchy political programme. And this for a country that is still at war with Russian-backed rebels in the east, and only just emerging from a catastrophic economic slump five years ago.
Mr Zelensky has turned his outsider status into his political strength, tapping into public disgust with the presidency of Petro Poroshenko, who has only made halting inroads into the country's poverty and corrupt political system.
Mr Poroshenko, a confectionery billionaire, was elected in 2014 in the wake of a popular revolution against the kleptocratic and pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. That revolution took place here in Maidan Square, and it resulted in the deaths of well over 100 Ukrainians.
These Ukrainians died for dignity, for freedom, and for the chance of Ukraine to change, for their chance for Ukrainians to live in a different set of rules where corruption is not the rule, but where corruption is the exemption from the rules.
It unleashed a series of events that almost tore the country apart, with the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, and then the insurgency by rebels in eastern Donbass region.
Under Mr Poroshenko's presidency, the economy has stabilised and growth has returned. And he has implemented some important reforms, not least, changes to the gas tariff system, public procurement, and VAT collection, which are all big sources of corruption. He's also helped to instil a sense of pro-western Ukrainian national identity. And he's bolstered the army.
But Ukrainians still seem incredibly fed up with corruption and persistent poverty to the point where, six months ago, Petro Poroshenko had been written out of this race.
He had a chance to use all that enabling field and window full of opportunities to deliver very radical changes in Ukraine, and to build up... to reform the criminal justice, to deliver fairness, to fight with impunity. However, some of the reforms which he introduced were not a result of his sincere political will, but a result of the synergetic pressure from civil society journalists and international partners of Ukraine.
Yulia Tymoshenko, a two-time prime minister who had been campaigning very strongly and was in pole position in this race, with a populist platform of pension and wage raises, and attacking the IMF, has since fallen into third place and looks likely not to qualify. One big question is the links between Mr Zelensky and Igor Kolomoyskyi, one of Ukraine's shadier oligarchs who is now in exile in Israel.
Mr Zelensky became a TV star thanks to his hit comedy show, A Servant of the People, in which he plays a teacher who becomes president. He has been using his comedy shows as thinly-veiled campaign rallies, but bizarrely, with only a smattering of campaign politics in them. Ukrainians seem to love it. Fiction is becoming fact, it seems, in Ukraine.
