KYIV – New polling results about the ratings of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s top political parties have confirmed both relative stability in political attitudes as well as creeping impatience with the pace of change. Furthermore, there have been a have been a number of noteworthy developments on the domestic scene that help illuminate how the political situation in Ukraine is developing.
The president’s ruling Servant of the People party, plagued by scandals and under relentless fire from its political opponents, appears to be holding its own. If elections were to be held now, it would still win more seats than its three main rivals combined. Mr. Zelenskyy, however, has to contend with an apparent erosion of his popularity, which for the first time has fallen to under 50 percent.
According to a survey conducted on January 24-28 by the Social Monitoring Center and the Ukrainian Institute for Social Research named after Oleksandr Yaremenko that was published on February 3, 49.4 percent those polled were satisfied with President Zelenskyy’s performance, while 39.3 percent were not. Mr. Zelenskyy’s rating has plummeted from 73 percent in September 2019 to 52 percent at the end of November 2019, and then rose again sharply in December 2019 to 67 percent.
While it is not possible to explain these sharp fluctuations with certainty, much depends on the type of questions asked and how the results are reported. Different pollsters ask about the level of trust in the president or degree of satisfaction with his performance. Upon presentation in the news media, the results are usually simplified to read as the degree of his popularity.
In this most recent poll, it was also pointed out by the Kyiv Post that the initial version of the survey’s results stated that President Zelenskyy’s rating stood at 51.6 percent, but was later corrected to 49 percent.
Paradoxically, these findings do not seem to square with the results of another opinion poll, conducted by the Rating Sociological Group and published on February 5, which affirm the enduring support of most of those polled for Mr. Zelenskyy’s party. If elections were to be held this weekend, four political parties would pass the 5 percent threshold and win representation in the Verkhovna Rada.
Servant of the People remains far ahead of other parties and is supported by 42.2 percent of those polled. This is only slightly down from the 43.16 percent in last July’s election. The pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party remains in second place, with 13.5 percent supporting it, a slight increase from the 13.05 percent it obtained at the polls. Former President Petro Poroshenko is currently backed by 9.5 percent as compared with 8.10 percent at the time of the July 2019 elections, and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party comes in fourth with roughly the same level of support today and in July of last year – 8.1 percent.
While on the surface little appears to have changed, the latest polls nevertheless contain a number of noteworthy indicators. First, that Ukrainian rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk’s Voice (Holos) party, which obtained 5.8 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections, would currently not cross the 5 percent threshold. Mr. Vakarchuk’s own performance, along with that of his colleagues, is generally regarded as having been disappointingly lackluster, and he has not managed to establish himself convincingly as an independent voice nor, it seems, to separate his business interests from his aspirations to be a progressive political leader.
Second, despite assuming the role of an outspoken critic of President Zelenskyy and his team, Ms. Tymoshenko has not managed to boost her ratings. In fact, her Batkivshchyna party has even been overtaken in polling by European Solidarity. Speculation abounds that her only hope of remaining politically afloat for the longer term is to forge an unholy alliance with her political enemy in recent years, Mr. Poroshenko, or to risk making common cause with the Opposition Platform – For Life party.
Despite its inexperience and internal divisions, Mr. Zelenskyy’s political force, which holds the majority in the Verkhovna Rada, has managed without too much difficulty to withstand the criticism leveled aby its opponents. Servant of the People members themselves are divided ideologically between the pro-Moscow camp of former Party of the Regions deputies and the loose coalition that has gradually emerged linking European Solidarity, Batkivshchyna and Voice.
Mr. Poroshenko’s attempts to depict President Zelenskyy as a “capitulator” before Russia have had the steam taken out of them by the latter’s principled position. After initially playing up unsuccessfully to the new Ukrainian leader, Ms. Tymoshenko has shifted away from her populism aimed at older voters and made opposition to land reform, or rather the opening of the land market, her new battleground.
In fact, internal splits, lack of party discipline and coordination, have posed more of a challenge to the hastily formed and unpracticed Servant of the People faction than the crossfire from its political rivals. Several of its deputies have tarnished the image of their new party by outlandish statements, inappropriate behavior or conflicts of interests.
In October 2019, President Zelenskyy went as far as to insist that lawmakers from his faction accused of corruption take polygraph tests. Since then, the head of the Verkhovna Rada’s Foreign Policy and Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation Committee was replaced after being caught by journalists corresponding during a parliamentary session on a dating site, while the most recent scandal involves a national deputy advising a pensioner to sell her pet dog if she cannot afford to pay her utility bills.
In practice, it has not even been possible to guarantee that the faction’s members will all vote along party lines. There have also been some serious scandals involving the bugging of senior officials, including the prime minister, suggesting that professionals from the security services are being utilized for political ends in “dirty tricks,” or that the faction contains “Trojan horses” working for Mr. Zelenskyy’s detractors. On February 6, Security Service of Ukraine agents raided the studios of Ihor Kolomoisky’s 1+1 TV channel to investigate rumors that comments made by the prime minister to his Cabinet colleagues were leaked by a Servant of the People national deputy who has works for that channel.
The notorious oligarch Mr. Kolomoisky has continued to cast his shadow over Mr. Zelenskyy’s team. But here, too, damage containment measures appear to be bearing fruit. The Ukrainian president has sought to reassure Ukraine’s Western partners that he will not permit the country’s largest bank, PrivatBank, which was nationalized in 2016, to be returned to Mr. Kolomoisky and wants this to be backed up by Parliament.
Most intriguingly, the controversial head of the Presidential Office, Andrii Bohdan, who was closely linked with Mr. Kolomoisky, has been conspicuously absent for some time, fueling speculation about the reasons for his sudden absence from the political scene.
Just this week, the Servant of the People party secured preliminary approval of a bill that demonstrates a determination to move on with political reform. It is proposing to reduce the number of seats in the Verkhovna Rada from 450 to 300; introduce a system of proportional representation with open party lists; and make the knowledge of Ukrainian obligatory for all elected national deputies.
Despite the difficulties of getting reforms under way in the “turbo regime” that they announced, the ratings of President Zelenskyy and his parliamentary faction still remain relatively high. It is clear that most Ukrainian voters and foreign observers continue to be hopeful and give him the benefit of the doubt.
Last month, during a candid interview, The Times of Israel reminded Mr. Zelenskyy that he been promised the electorate that, among other things, he would wage a war against corruption. How is this battle progressing, it asked him. “It’s complicated,” he replied. “First, we’re reforming the state prosecution. Several thousand prosecutors were fired. Several hundred prosecutors are being required to re-qualify – about a six-month process.”
Second, the president continued, “we are now legislating to reform the security services. Again, it’s a long process. We appointed a new head of the state investigation bureau, and she will reform the hierarchy. We introduced an anti-corruption court in September. There are many problems with it, as with the entire judicial process in Ukraine.”
Mr. Zelenskyy’s main message was that the campaign has been launched, “but it’s a long battle…. once we have these strong institutions, we will stop all the corruption.”
He can take comfort in the fact that the European Union has just praised Ukraine’s reform efforts “and the significant progress already achieved,” and allocated assistance for the development of farming. At the sixth meeting of the Ukraine-European Union Association Council held in Brussels on January 28, unanimous support was expressed for Ukraine, though the emphasis was once again placed on the need to continue promoting change. It acknowledged Ukraine’s success in stabilizing the macroeconomic situation and welcomed the government’s steps to open the land market.
Meanwhile, another new survey, conducted by the Socis Social and Marketing Research Center last month, confirmed that if a referendum on joining the European Union was held in the near future, most Ukrainians would vote in favor of it: 58.6 percent of respondents wanted to join the European Union, while 23.7 percent said they would vote against. If a referendum on joining NATO was held, 46.2 percent of respondents expressed their readiness to vote in favor and 31.5 percent against.