Owen Matthews
Volodymyr Zelensky’s transformation from a much-loved television comedian to Ukraine’s president and wartime leader is one of the strangest political journeys of our times. It began in 2015 with Servant of the People, a television comedy written by and starring Zelensky, who plays a young high-school teacher launching into a foul-mouthed rant against the corruption and venality of his country’s political class. ‘Why are all the honest people fools and the clever ones are thieves?’ shouts Zelensky’s character, a nerdy but honest history master. ‘What kind of people are we, that we keep voting for these mother–f***ing liars knowing that they are crooks?’ A pupil secretly films the rant through a window, the video goes viral and millions of Ukrainians crowdfund the honest teacher to stand in an upcoming presidential election, which he unexpectedly wins. Cue a two-season long comedy of errors wherein the fictional President Holoborodko struggles to take on entrenched corruption and break the stranglehold of shadowy oligarchs – with the help of his old schoolmates, whom he appoints as his ministers.
The idea of the then 41-year-old Zelensky actually standing for president went from a joke to deadly earnest reality in 2018, when the influential oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky threw his financial backing behind a real-world political run. Zelensky’s billboard campaign slogan, launched on New Year’s 2019, was ‘I’m not kidding!’
Zelensky’s inexperience was, paradoxically, the key to his popularity on the campaign trail. Then-incumbent President Petro Poroshenko was, in common with every one of his predecessors, mired in corruption scandals. Ukrainian voters were fed up with generations of lies and of seeing the same old faces on the political carousel. Zelensky was, in many ways, a liberal mirror-image of Donald Trump – a radical outsider with no political experience, familiar from the world of television, who vowed to drain the political swamp.
Paradoxically, given subsequent events, Zelensky was elected as the candidate most likely to reconcile with Russia and bridge some of the bitter divides that had split Ukraine since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Russian-backed secession of Donetsk and Luhansk. Like many Ukrainian citizens, Zelensky spoke Russian at home rather than Ukrainian. Indeed, Servant of the People was made almost entirely in Russian on the grounds that almost all Ukrainian speakers know Russian but many Russian speakers don’t know Ukrainian. The imposition of Ukrainian as a national language, including in schools and universities, had been a major cause of resentment in the Russophone east of the country. And as far back as 2015, Zelensky spoke out against nationalists’ calls to ban Russian artists from performing in Ukraine – and though he supported Ukraine’s ambition to join Nato and the EU, he resisted Poroshenko’s inflammatory anti-Russian rhetoric.
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