Ukraine was covered by a green tsunami: Why dummies under the guise of Zelensky won
Vladimir Zelensky's Servant of the People party gains full control of the Verkhovna Rada. The number of majority districts won has set a record for the entire period of Ukrainian “independence.” Even the Party of Regions in its best years did not have so much. Ukrainians have made their choice, and they will live with it for the next five years. But why didn’t the forecasts about “pro-Russian revenge” come true?
The elections were held with a depressingly low turnout - it barely reached 50%. And three months earlier, during the presidential campaign, there was a record high level of activity. But this outcome was predetermined - summer, vacations, labor migration, dachas with vegetable gardens.
These elections also did not shine with the twist of intrigue. The winner was obvious from the start. In fact, the elections themselves were conceived in order to have time to convert the unprecedentedly high level of citizens’ trust in the new president into deputy mandates for members of his party.
When the parties were just nominating candidates, the list of nominees for the majoritarian seat from Servant of the People aroused outright skepticism among observers: they say, who are all these people? Every first one is not googleable, every second one has practically no track record: he was born, studied and is now running for deputies. Every third person is a restaurateur, the owner of an IT startup, a blogger or an expert on some kind of reform. Journalists and political scientists were surprised - why expose such people, as they called them, “frivolous boys and girls.” After all, they will lose.
The flaw in such reasoning was the complete ignorance of the trend noted at the start of the campaign - the demand for new faces and the desire to “ride” old politicians were so strong, and the ratings of Servant of the People were so off the charts that even a monkey could be nominated from the presidential party - and that would have won. A number of pre-election measurements in key constituencies even before the elections indicated the readiness of people to vote even for Chikatilo - the main thing is that he was from the “correct” party.
Election night became the moment of truth - almost everywhere “new faces” were pearling like tanks, trampling the long-term “masters of the districts” into the grass. Only a few “old deputies” managed to break through and survive. Many still continue to desperately fight for votes with newcomers, clinging to the edge of the toilet so as not to be washed away into political oblivion. Ex-speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Vladimir Litvin, billionaire and former sponsor of BYuT Konstantin Zhevago, son-in-law of the ex-mayor of Kiev Alexander Suprunenko, former capital mayor Omelchenko are losing the elections; the all-powerful “master of Transcarpathia” Viktor Baloga risks being left without a mandate. The right and left hands of Poroshenko, the odious people’s deputies Kononenko and Granovsky flew by in the “fed” constituencies. With every hour of vote counting, the chances of Opposition Bloc leader Boris Kolesnikov becoming a deputy are decreasing; almost the entire old elite of the Odessa region, including the “unsinkable” ex-regional Sergei Kivalov, has been left out of big politics. In Zaporozhye, industrial magnate and owner of Motor Sich Vyacheslav Boguslaev lost to a little-known “servant of the people” (27-year-old wedding photographer!). In Kyiv, the “servants of the people” took all the districts, ousting the Svoboda activists Ilyenko and Levchenko, officials from the Klitschko administration and Yushchenko’s “beloved friends” from politics.
The situation is the same in Kharkov, where from the “old guard” only opposition bloc member Dmitry Shentsev has survived and people’s deputy Alexander Feldman continues to fight for victory with varying degrees of success. Everyone else who was supported by local mayor Gennady Kernes was shown the door by the people.
Another important result of these elections is that they demonstrated that the old electoral maps that they still like to use in Moscow are hopelessly outdated. There is no longer any monolithic pro-Russian southeast. Medvedchuk-Boiko's OPZZh is a party in Donbass, the only region where it took first place. On the other extreme flank is Poroshenko’s Eurosolidarity - this is the party of the Lviv region, waving the banners of extreme nationalism. Between these two poles there is an endless green sea. Zelensky reigns supreme here.
The first bell of such changes sounded during the spring presidential elections, revealing the “new southeast” with its electoral leader Zelensky. But then many chose not to notice this and pretend that what happened was not a long-term trend, but an accident. That everything will return to its previous status, and the traitor-voter will return to his usual electoral stall. It was with these statements that political scientists from Viktor Medvedchuk’s pool reassured their employers and the gullible Moscow public. They say that Zelensky’s ratings are falling, and disappointed voters in the southeast are about to line up en masse at the offices of “For Life” in the hope of returning under the omophorion of Boyko and Rabinovich.
However, this did not happen. Not only did the voter not return, but in a number of areas the spring trend only strengthened. One can, of course, attribute everything to low turnout, but it is not at all obvious that if those who voted with their feet had nevertheless come, the result would have been fundamentally different.
The role of the electoral center of the “new southeast” this time was taken by the Dnepropetrovsk region - here the Servant of the People rating is the highest - about 60%. And the lowest is in the Lviv region - 20%. The Lviv region is the only region of the country where the “Servant of the People” rating is below 30%. At the same time, in the controlled part of Donbass, Zelensky’s party also has a good result - 30%, which is 5 percent more than Zelensky himself received there in the first round of the presidential election.
These numbers are the objective reality of today. As well as the result of the OPZH - about 13%, which is only one and a half percent more than Yuri Boyko had in the presidential elections. Agree, an increase of one and a half percent is far from the “revenge” that supporters of this party were seriously counting on before the elections, picturing it with 15 or even 18% of the votes.
Now there are signals about the possibility of a future coalition of “Servant of the People” with “Voice” of Svyatoslav Vakarchuk and “Batkivshchyna” of Yulia Tymoshenko. Strictly speaking, the results of the presidential party make it possible to do without satellites, but the “Western partners” need a stable majority and the opportunity to influence the overly independent “Servant of the People”, who is too connected with Ukrainian groups of oligarchs, in contrast to the completely tame “Voice” stuffed with grant eaters, for whom some pre-election polls showed almost third place, but in fact he had to be dragged into the Rada almost by the ears.
And Tymoshenko is convenient for the West with her ability to adapt to the circumstances of the moment. For Tymoshenko, this is the second failed election in a row, which she worked in the role of a “political shadow” of higher-rated candidates. No new ideas, no new people, and Petro Poroshenko is consistently ahead of her by half a length - such is the electoral karma of the ex-prime minister today.
Poroshenko’s party found itself in the new Rada solely due to the low turnout and insufficient activity of Zelensky’s team, which never gave the law enforcement system clear signals that the new government sees its predecessor’s place not in parliament, but in prison. In fact, the “corral” of Poroshenko and Co. was carried out almost exclusively by Andrei Portnov alone, with information support from the media platform and activist resource of video blogger Anatoly Shariy. If Zelensky had been more active and turned on at least the SBU controlled by him against Poroshenko’s corrupt circle, the ex-president could have lost that couple of percent of votes, which ultimately allowed him to overcome the five percent barrier.
Be that as it may, at the end of August all of them - both new and surviving old ones - will gather in the hall under the dome on Grushevsky Street in Kyiv. As they say, show must go on.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.