Current national lawmaker and two-time Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is the front runner, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and newcomer Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a showman and perhaps the country’s most popular comedian.
However, no potential victor – the top three so far have not officially registered their candidacies as of January 15 – enjoys a clear path to the country’s highest political seat. None of the three approaches 20 percent popularity among voters in the first round that requires a simple majority to ensure inauguration.
This, coupled with the fact that one-fifth of voters are still undecided – mostly women who reside in central and western Ukraine, makes it difficult to foresee who the two final candidates will be for the likely runoff vote in April.
It’s “a wide-open race,” said Stephen Nix of the International Republican Institute (IRI) on January 4 during a video conference held by the Transatlantic Task Force on Elections and Civil Society in Ukraine.
Citing the IRI poll published before Ukraine was granted a decree to establish an independent Orthodox Church on January 6 and Russia’s attack on Ukrainian naval ships in late November 2018, he added that these events could change “the dynamic” and could have a “tremendous effect” and likely “move these undecided numbers,” according to a report by the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.
Among the subsample of likely voters, Ms. Tymoshenko leads with 19 percent of support, followed by Mr. Poroshenko (13.5 percent) and Mr. Zelensky (12.7 percent), according to an average of five recent surveys released by January 4, according to Wooden Horse Strategies, a political consultancy based in Kyiv.
Three surveys released in November-December 2018 using a nationwide sample of registered voters show that Ms. Tymoshenko’s and Mr. Zelensky’s election prospects have mostly stagnated whereas Mr. Poroshenko’s have jumped by nearly 5 percentage points, according to separate polls by Rating Group, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, and the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation (DIF) jointly with the Razumkov Center.
“The incumbent appears to have benefited from his crusade for an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church… and shrugged off divergent reactions to the late November imposition of 30-day martial law…,” said Dragon Capital, a Kyiv-based investment bank, in a study devoted to the upcoming election that was released on January 8.
Mr. Poroshenko, 53, so far has pushed messages plastered on billboards with “Army! Language! Faith!” The patriotic tone of the slogan is in reference to Kyiv withstanding Russian aggression in the Donbas war that is in its fifth year, the successful pursuit of a self-governing national Orthodox Church and the promotion of the Ukrainian language through film production, language quotas on television and radio, as well as the new education law.
A future reduction in his rating isn’t likely, said Iryna Bekeshkina, director of DIF, based on statements published on the think tank’s website. She added that he suffers the highest “rejection” rating among potential candidates when voters are asked for which candidate they wouldn’t vote – 50 percent, whereas Ms. Tymoshenko is far lower with 26 percent and Mr. Zelensky is at 10 percent.
Ms. Tymoshenko, 58, is known as a populist who has twice unsuccessfully run for the country’s highest office. Like the incumbent president, she has been in politics since the 1990s and served twice as prime minister in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution that overcame a fraudulent presidential election in favor of then-candidate Viktor Yanukovych whom Russian President Vladimir Putin backed during his first presidential run.
She dominated the natural gas trade in the first decade of Ukraine’s independence. Her opposition to Mr. Yanukovych after his successful run for president in 2010 cost her two years in prison. Former President Leonid Kuchma said she was “the only male in Ukrainian politics” in early 2015, when comparing her to Mr. Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko who eventually attained the presidency that year.
She has called for changes to the Constitution of Ukraine to make the country more like a parliamentary republic. Called the “New Economic Course,” her platform calls for halving natural gas prices for households in a move that surely will irk Ukraine’s chief lender, the International Monetary Fund. Videos that promote her candidacy also contain the time-worn slogans of fighting corruption, ending the illegal felling of trees in the Carpathian Mountains and other populist messages.
Unlike previous presidential elections that usually pitted the western and eastern parts of the country split along the Dnipro River, sociologist Mr. Bekeshkina noted that this time around there really is no significant geographic difference.
“Yulia Tymoshenko has support in all the regions (more in some areas, less in others),” she said. “But with Petro Poroshenko, he also has support in almost all the regions except in the east, but their support is relatively the same.”
Thus, Ms. Tymoshenko will probably “battle again in the runoff” with Mr. Poroshenko like she did in 2014 when the incumbent president secured a first-round landslide victory, said Brian Mefford, the American director of Wooden Horse Strategies, in a blog for the Atlantic Council this month.
Given her pedigree, Ms. Tymoshenko “is a formidable opponent for President Poroshenko,” an editorial in the magazine Business Ukraine said on January 14. “She is probably the most skilled politician in the country and a powerful orator who has intimidated the biggest beasts of Ukrainian politics for over two decades.”
Significantly, current polls indicate that Mr. Poroshenko would lose to both Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr. Zelensky in a runoff.
The eventual entry of Mr. Zelensky, 40, into the presidential race highlights the electorate’s disenchantment with the current political landscape of the same faces.
Dragon Capital considers him a “stealth candidate” for oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky on whose main television channel the actor and comedian performs in cabarets and starred in a popular TV series.
Visible on television for 20 years, Mr. Zelensky is most recently known by his character as a jaded history teacher who gets elected as president thanks to his students’ social media campaign efforts. Known as “Servant of the People,” its first season was even purchased by Netflix and made available with English and Bulgarian subtitles.
He utilized this image of an ordinary person who wishes to clean up government on New Year’s Eve during a live broadcast on the oligarch’s 1+1 channel that aired during the president’s New Year message. Mr. Poroshenko’s greeting was broadcast with delay after the comedian’s official candidacy announcement.
“The phenomenon of Zelensky is quite simple,” Ms. Bekeshkina said. “People are completely disgruntled with all politicians, that’s why they seek out non-systemic candidates.”
A rejection of the political establishment was also noted in an analysis by Warsaw-based think tank Center for Eastern Studies (OSW). Mr. Zelensky’s relatively high support “results” in the “voters’ readiness to cast their votes for so-called ‘new faces.’”
So far, his public statements are populist in nature and reveal “political and economic ignorance,” according to an analysis published on January 9 by OSW.
For example, he has promised to get lower interest rates for Ukraine from the IMF, even though the Washington-based financial institution is known as the “lender of last resort” for governments on the verge of default.
Mr. Zelensky enjoys popularity among the 18- to 29-year-old demographic, with 23 percent support, although that segment usually has lower turnouts than its older counterparts, according to Dragon Capital.
Over all, the candidates face severe distrust in the general political system and 70 percent of the electorate saying that the country is “heading in the wrong direction,” according to polls.
Like in the previous presidential election, more than 20 candidates are expected to run and, aside from the usual “dummy” candidates designed to steal votes, most are doing so to either retain or gain name recognition for the October parliamentary elections.
“The majority of presidential candidates are actually campaigning for Parliament,” American consultant Mr. Mefford said. “And standing in the presidential election is merely a method to raise their visibility beforehand.”
Candidates must provide a deposit of $90,000 to run for office that is refunded only if they get elected or make it to the second round.
The runoff election is scheduled for April 21, and the results should be announced by May 1, according to the Central Election Commission. Swearing in takes place at most 30 days after the official outcome is published.