For four years on Ukrainian television, Volodymyr Zelenskyy played a man who becomes president by accident. Then, in 2019, he did it for real.
The show was “Servant of the People”, which first aired in 2015 and ended the year he won the office. Zelenskyy, who studied law at the Kyiv National Economic University, never took the usual lawyer’s road. He chose comedy instead. In 2003 he and Serhiy and Boris Shefir launched the production company Kvartal 95 Studio. Zelenskyy was quoted as saying the group wanted to “make the world a better place, a kinder and more joyful place” through humor and creativity.
From the screen to the ballot
The party that carried his name into politics borrowed the show’s title. Servant of the People was founded in 2017 as the successor to the Party of Decisive Change, and in late 2018 it announced that Zelenskyy would lead its ticket. He came first in the opening round of the 2019 presidential vote, then beat Petro Poroshenko in the run-off with 73 percent. His pitch was unity. A Jewish, Russian-speaking Ukrainian, he knew how divided the country was, and he ran on bringing it together.
Atlantic Council analyst Steven Pifer, writing a year into the term, noted that Zelenskyy took office on May 20, 2019, as independent Ukraine’s sixth president, and that he promised the real fight against corruption that so many voters wanted. In July 2019 his party won a majority of seats in parliament. No Ukrainian president’s party had ever commanded a clear majority without coalition partners before that.
A mixed first year
Parliament backed his choice of prime minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, and a cabinet most observers considered honest and pro-reform, if young and inexperienced. Lawmakers pushed through what was called a “turbo regime” of legislation, including an end to immunity for parliamentary deputies and a mechanism for presidential impeachment. Critics said some of those laws were ill-prepared in the rush.
Pifer called Zelenskyy personally honest, someone who had not profited from office, which he said could not be claimed of his predecessors. A question hung over his link to oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, whose television channel broadcast the comedy show. On May 13, 2020, parliament approved the “Anti-Kolomoiskiy Law”, blocking nationalized banks from returning to former owners, and that looked like the answer.
Still, the record had holes. Zelenskyy fired Honcharuk in early March 2020, six months after the government was appointed. Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka, praised by anti-corruption activists, was replaced by a friend of the president with no prosecutorial experience. Security sector reform went nowhere, and the judiciary saw little change. Pifer’s verdict: too early for a final judgment, but Zelenskyy would “have to do better.”
The invasion
Everything changed when Russia invaded in 2022. Western countries offered to evacuate him. He stayed in Ukraine and, as AS USA put it, took up a rifle. That choice turned a former television comedian into the face of Ukrainian resistance.
Sources
- Zelenskyy’s first year: New beginning or false dawn? – Atlantic Council
- Was Volodymyr Zelenskyy a comedian? How did Zelenskyy become president? – AS USA
