How can one explain the sweeping victory of Volodymyr Zelensky and his party in the Ukrainian presidential and parliamentary elections of 2019?

Only four months before the March 2019 presidential elec­tion, the Ukrainian political scene looked familiar. President Poroshenko was seeking re-election on a pro-European integra­tion platform, and the strongest opposition figure was the ide­ologically similar Yulia Tymoshenko, who remained critical of Poroshenko's record on reform.

All the calculations and strategies that these main players had developed for the campaign were confounded on New Year 's Eve, when the popular comedian Volodymyr Zelensky announced on television his intention to participate in the election. Zelensky represented the direct opposite of establishment candidates—he had zero political experience and the mien of an honest everyman. A successful entrepreneur, he rose to fame as the star of an unpre­tentious Russian-language comedy television show, but he also possessed the Charlie Chaplin-like charisma of a “little man” refusing to accept this world's injustices. The latter came out clearly in a television series called Servant of the People, where Zelensky played a lowly history teacher who accidentally becomes the presi­dent and attempts to build a more equitable Ukraine. The runaway success of this series gave Zelensky and his supporters the idea of transitioning into politics, and early secret polling showed that he could do very well in an election. Zelensky's open acknowledgment of being Jewish did not hurt his popularity at all, contradicting the stereotype of Ukrainian anti-Semitism.

By the beginning of March, Zelensky's candidacy came to dom­inate the polls, leaving all others to fight over a place in the run­offs. Shrewdly, he and his advisors delayed until the last moment the release of any platform, which meant that voters ascribed to him the intentions of his popular television persona. Zelensky did not speak against the Ukrainian language and culture but downplayed such issues by stressing that peace and reforms had to take precedence. He managed to undercut his main rivals by attracting voters from across the ethno-linguistic spectrum—both Ukrainian- and Russian-speakers, who, for quite different reasons, felt disillusioned with Poroshenko and his traditional opponents. Meanwhile, Poroshenko had to use all his considerable powers as president and oligarchical owner of two television channels to se­cure second place in the race. He campaigned on the slogan, “The army, the language, and faith,” but even during the de facto war with Russia, such a narrowly national-patriotic program appealed to only a small sector of the electorate. Poroshenko's unsuccessful attempt to introduce martial law after the Russians captured Ukrainian navy boats in the Strait of Kerch in November 2018 undermined his posture as commander-in-chief. Erupting just be­fore the election, a corruption scandal over military acquisitions involving his longtime business partner, then serving as deputy chairman of the Council of National Security and Defense, made the president's slogans about the army ring hollow.

Thirty-nine candidates were on the ballot on March 31, 2019, but Zelensky enjoyed a clear lead in this crowded field, receiving 30.24 percent of the vote. Poroshenko came a very distant second, with 15.95 percent, followed by Tymoshenko with 13.40. The top ten included two mutually antagonistic candidates from the pro­Russian opposition; taken together, their share of the vote would have been 15.82 percent. For all the talk in the Western media about the alleged influence of Ukrainian right-wing groups, the candidate from their flagship Freedom Party received only 1.62 percent. Going into the run-offs, Poroshenko attempted to recruit the supporters of other candidates, but he could not overcome his remarkably high negative rating—the share of voters prepared to vote for anyone but him.

Following Zelensky's astonishing success in the spring of 2019, parliamentary elections were scheduled for October. However, his advisors hoped to leverage the president's current popularity, and Zelensky dissolved parliament on his inauguration day, thus triggering snap elections for July. His party was a very recent cre­ation. Zelensky campaigned for president without having his own party, although polls had demonstrated strong support for a hypo­thetical populist force, and the party name Servant of the People had been registered proactively in 2018. The work of creating a party and selecting its candidates for the parliamentary election was done hur­riedly during May and June of 2019. The overwhelming majority of the candidates were younger people with little political experience, but who had worked for NGOs or studied in the West. The party leadership consisted of Zelensky's circle of entertainment-industry lawyers and managers, together with a few former bureaucrats and trusted political commentators. Sensing the nature of his po­litical appeal, Zelensky promised that the party would not ally in the future parliament with either Poroshenko or the pro-Russian opposition. An alliance with Yulia Tymoshenko was apparently considered, but Zelensky's advisors quickly understood that they could capture some of her voters by imitating her populist rhetoric. Soliciting Tymoshenko's support would have meant giving her and her people their share of high appointments and potentially would have proven unnecessary. Thus, Zelensky's party announced that it would not include in its list any candidates who had served previ­ously in parliament. This anti-establishment message held its appeal on election day.

In the election held on July 21, 2019, Servant of the People won an outright majority in the parliament by securing 254 seats of 450, and for the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, the winning party did not need to join any coalitions. The pro-Russian opposi­tion, now organized as the tandem of the Opposition Platform and the new party For Life, came second with 43 seats; followed by Tymoshenko's Fatherland with 26, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc with 25, and the new party Voice with 20. It is telling that the Servant of the People won in both colleges: it received 124 seats of the 225 awarded based on the nationwide vote for party lists and 130 seats of the 199 in the first-by-the-post territorial electoral districts. (The total number of the latter was also 225, but 26 were in areas not controlled by the Ukrainian authorities.)¹⁵

The success of Zelensky's party led to attempts by others to emulate his approach. For example, For Life (with the connota­tion of “for a good life” rather than pro-life) was established by the pro-Russian businessman-cum-television personality Vadym Rabynovych in order to capture voters not enthused by the gloomy-looking Boiko. Similarly, a rock singer popular with patri­otic youth, Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, created Voice to appeal to those younger voters disillusioned with Poroshenko. It was widely ex­pected that Voice would enter a close alliance with the Poroshenko Bloc, but instead it was courted by Servant of the People as a po­tential coalition partner. In the end, however, their alliance was informal and short-lived.