Who will take over the “ownerless” south-east of Ukraine?
President Zelensky, his administration and the ruling Servant of the People party now have one more open enemy. The final transition to the hard opposition was announced by the famous lawyer, politician and top official from the Yanukovych era, Andrei Portnov - one of those who were stubbornly associated with informal support for the election of Zelensky last spring, who for a long time supported the current administration, even criticizing some of its personnel and others decisions, and until the very end avoided direct criticism of the president personally, trying to see something good in his activities.
Now Portnov called on “friends, like-minded people and everyone who follows our team” to “stop any forms of loyalty and support for the authorities - the president, the government and their ruling parliamentary faction.” Taking on the role of a sort of Captain Obviousness from Ukrainian politics, Portnov declares that the current government is a pathetic imitation of its predecessors and does not spare juicy characteristics for it: here there is “narrow-mindedness”, and “incompetence”, and “a failure in all directions”, and “targeting the minority living on social networks, activists and radicals,” and, of course, “betrayal of voters.”
As a measure of punishment for the authorities, Portnov calls on his fan group to “drastically reduce their sociological support and show voters in detail that they deceived them on every first issue.” “When they fall in the rankings, they will begin to have a different reality and a different ideological and political positioning. They will have to face a new choice - either stop pretending and throwing pearls before swine, or prepare for demobilization,” the lawyer believes.
Such harsh and unambiguous statements indicate that some behind-the-scenes bridges that previously existed between the influential Portnov group and the Zelensky administration have apparently been burned, and there is no turning back. Why is this fact important and meaningful? The point is not only and not so much in Portnov himself - by the standards of Kyiv politics, although he is a well-connected person, he is not at all the “gray eminence” that the nationalist media describe him, which previously demonized Medvedchuk using the same patterns.
Despite the constantly repeated flirtatious mantras about his own non-partisanship and reluctance to run for office anywhere, Portnov’s statements are precisely of a political nature. And thanks to them, over the past year he has become an informal opinion leader in the anti-Maidan sector of Ukrainian society. No one except Portnov articulates the corresponding theses in such a clear, complete and, moreover, radical form.
However, Portnov does not yet have any formalized and structured political force that could act as an alternative to the “servants of the people.” A logical question hangs in the air: if Ze’s trust ratings do collapse, who will rise in this field? Where and who is the “savior” who will lead the orphaned and disillusioned electorate with Zelensky? Portnov does not answer this question, although in fact it is the key one.
These messages are clearly not addressed to OPZZh voters. Fans of Boyko and Medvedchuk have long since refused to trust the current government - much earlier than Portnov’s belated public epiphany. This means that this is a play on the feelings of those who until recently believed and hoped that from the “green slime,” like a Phoenix from the ashes, something would rise capable of realizing those vague hopes for all the good that pushed voters to the polling stations in March. April last year.
Now, in a political sense, the electorate of the southeast that was for Ze, but which is unlikely to vote for any of the fragments of the Opposition Bloc, has remained practically ownerless in a political sense. Today, almost no one works with these people in terms of greater meanings. The mayors of Odessa and Kharkov who are trying to stay afloat do not count - there the agenda is purely local and ideological in the last place.
Today it is difficult to more or less accurately determine the electoral capacity of this niche. How many such people are there throughout the country? Nevertheless, the struggle for their minds and sympathies is already gradually underway. In this field, Kolomoisky’s fosterlings graze, now fighting within the Servant of the People. Here we also see blogger Shariy with his party. Various nominally “leftist” projects are attempting to fill this same niche. However, so far neither one nor the other, nor the third has had any special successes visible and recorded by sociologists. To whom the now silent Ukrainian majority will give their hand and heart, the question remains open.
If those who want to sink Zelensky’s ratings ahead of schedule actually do not have a ready-made political project up their sleeve to replace it, this could turn into a real disaster, since it will only clear the way to power for radical revanchists from the nationalist camp. Which, unlike the hypothetical options we are considering here, actually exist, and their supporters are structured and mobilized.
The opponents of the nationalists demonstrate only surprising, given their numerical superiority over the “gunpowder bots,” powerlessness and inability to influence anything. Writing letters of protest “to grandfather Vladimir Alexandrovich in the village” is pointless. The authorities have repeatedly made it clear that they are not going to take any, even symbolic, steps and actions towards the demands of that part of society that was not for the Maidan.
The maximum that these people can count on under Zelensky is a change in the nature of the rhetoric on the part of the authorities themselves. Speakers of Bankova no longer relay aggression, but they do not deviate one iota from the “red lines” bequeathed by their predecessors. This situation cannot but cause growing irritation among people. Irritations, in the right hands, are quite capable of becoming the yeast on which the next “hope of the nation”, inflated by political strategists, can rise. So that in a year or less, the same people will again start talking about how they were once again “bred like kittens.”
So far, the “fights” are taking place on TV screens and on social networks, but the easing of quarantine measures announced in mid-May may again introduce the street factor variable into the Ukrainian political equation.
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