KYIV – Runoff candidates Volodymyr Zelensky and incumbent Petro Poroshenko this week elaborated on the first steps they would take in the next presidential term.
Both presented similar approaches to fighting corruption that emphasized the need to reboot the law enforcement and judicial system.
They continued to jostle on holding one or more debates ahead of the April 21 second-round vote.
It remains unclear whether they will hold a contest of words as Mr. Zelensky, 41, a politically unproven comedian, is the clear leader with 61 percent support among those who intend to vote, according to a nationwide survey by Rating Sociological Group that was conducted on April 5-10. Multi-millionaire confectionary mogul Mr. Poroshenko, 58, enjoys 24 percent support among that segment of the electorate. An additional 15 percent are undecided.
Volodymyr Zelensky presidential campaign
Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky (right) with Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister and foreign affairs minister, on April 6 after meeting with the Yalta European Strategy supervisory board in Kyiv.
Mr. Zelensky has shied away from the public while engaging with potential voters via virtual reality. In messages sent through the Telegram application to followers, the showman said he wants to finalize the establishment of the long-awaited anti-corruption court, remove parliamentary immunity from prosecution, pay whistleblowers who uncover graft, create a separate unit to fight financial crimes and remove these powers from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and other institutions. Mr. Zelensky said he wants to staff independent graft-fighting bodies competitively through an international hiring pool.
Following his April 6 meeting with more than two dozen members of civil society, including corruption watchdogs, President Poroshenko promised to appoint judges to the newly created anti-corruption court in the coming days.
He promised to correct the “two main mistakes” that he has made as president: staffing decisions and lack of communication – he has rarely given public news conferences during his term and neglected dialogue with public advocacy groups during the last two years.
“Strategic communication was completely destroyed. The decisions were taken behind the scenes, and even if they were absolutely correct, they did not create trust in society,” he said. “I acknowledged this mistake.”
Mr. Poroshenko also promised to not appoint business associates to key positions. “And the second mistake is an error in personnel policy… I want to emphasize the following: no business partners, no close people will be appointed by Petro Poroshenko while he is president, including during the second term,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky has yet to allay fears that he is beholden to Ihor Kolomoisky, a billionaire on whose television channel the popular comedian has appeared in numerous shows, including a sitcom in which he plays a history teacher who accidentally becomes president.
The oligarch, who currently resides in Israel according to the Financial Times, has publicly vowed to work against the incumbent’s re-election. Mr. Kolomoisky briefly served as governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in the aftermath of the Euro-Maidan Revolution and helped avert the spread of Russian-backed separatism further in-country from the two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
He had a public spat with the president after his influence in certain industries – aviation, oil and gas, and banking – was reduced by policies that Mr. Poroshenko had pursued.
Both presidential candidates also appeared on television this week.
Mr. Zelensky again voiced support for further European Union integration and said he backed NATO accession, but wants to hold it to a popular referendum.
Presidential Administration of Ukraine/Mykola Lazarenko
Running for re-election, President Petro Poroshenko fields questions on the ICTV channel’s “Freedom of Speech” program on April 8 in Kyiv.
To bring peace to the Russian-stoked Donbas war that has killed more than 13,000 people, according to the United Nations, the front-runner wants to include the U.S. and Great Britain in peace talks with Russia.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has indicated that Russia is ready to re-new dialogue with Ukraine more openly should the upstart politician win. But the Donbas war won’t be discussed because “Moscow is not a participant… in the conflict,” he told the Russian news agency TASS on April 9.
Mr. Zelensky also promised to name who he’ll nominate to lead the defense and foreign affairs ministries, the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office by April 19, two days before the runoff vote.
Debates still in question
Although both candidates have taken doping tests, they haven’t agreed to terms on holding a debate that 74 percent of the electorate wants, according to recent polls held in March.
The two have agreed on Kyiv’s refurbished 70,000-seat Olympic Stadium as the venue. Mr. Poroshenko has so far proposed two dates, April 14 and April 19, while Mr. Zelensky has only offered April 19.
The stadium’s management has confirmed that it has received booking requests for those days from each candidate. Meanwhile, the Central Election Commission and state-run broadcaster UA:PBC have maintained that the debate should be held in the TV studio.
Biggest protest vote
Demographically, Mr. Zelensky draws support from a wide spectrum of society that signals the public’s thirst for a new leader that isn’t tied to the political establishment, according to an analysis by Maria Zolkina, political analyst for the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives think tank that jointly conducted the Western-funded exit poll on March 31.
“Voting for Zelensky was anomalous given that he was able to unite under his ‘banners’ voters with different characteristics, demands, motivation, and this vote – is not only ‘a protest,’ ” she wrote on April 7. “Yes, this is really the largest-scale protest vote in Ukraine’s history, and the voters did not go for the ideological or politically meaningful markers, and according to the criterion of non-alignment with the ‘old’ elites.”
Rating’s survey published on April 11 also shows that voters of all ages support Mr. Zelensky more than Mr. Poroshenko and are geographically dispersed – the front-runner lost Luhansk, Donetsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Ternopil oblasts only by narrow margins in the first round.
Ahead of the first vote, 60 percent of respondents had already voiced a “stable wish for new politicians,” Ms. Zolkina wrote.
She noted also that the front-runner’s obvious lack of public administration and political experience doesn’t affect his electorate because they view it as “an advantage when compared to his competitors and is not an issue or weak spot.”
Should he become Ukraine’s sixth president, Mr. Zelensky will become the country’s first Jewish president. Ukraine would also be the world’s second country after Israel to have Jews as both president and prime minister, the latter of whom is Volodymyr Groysman.
Poroshenko, Zelensky go to Paris
Meanwhile, the two rivals will separately pay visits to French President Emmanuel Macron on April 12, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a presidential source in Paris.
“France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine take part in the ‘Normandy’ format talks, established to implement a peace agreement for eastern Ukraine brokered in the Belarusian capital, Minsk,” the news agency reported on April 10.
Mr. Poroshenko is also scheduled to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the weekend before heading on April 14 to the Olympic Stadium, where he said he will appear at 2:14 p.m. local time even if Mr. Zelensky doesn’t.
The runoff results should be announced no later than May 1 and the inauguration should take place by June 3, according to the presidential election law.