The Ukrainian presidential elections resulted in a TV actor beating the incumbent (Petro Poroshenko) and a third-time candidate for president (Yulia Tymoshenko) into second and third places, respectively.
The first round of the Ukrainian elections was won by Volodymyr Zelensky, an actor, with no previous political experience – unless you include playing an anti-corruption campaigner who becomes president in a satirical TV show.
The election of Zelensky is yet another sign of the willingness of the working class to stray from the well-worn path the ruling elites would have them follow. Zelensky, however, is no anti-corruption superhero. His campaign was supported and partially funded by one of the many oligarchs who use their financial clout to try and wield political power in Ukraine. This support from Igor Kolomoisky, who owns a Ukrainian TV channel, casts a shadow over Zelensky’s anti-corruption credentials.
The incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, is himself a chocolate magnate and ranks among the wealthiest people in Ukraine. And Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister and presidential candidate, was at one time one of the richest people in the country as a result of her activities in the gas industry.
The rejection of these establishment characters by the Ukrainian working class is an indication of their growing impatience with the high-level corruption in Ukrainian government circles. The fact that they would rather vote for a TV comedian than their current president or their former prime minister is a measure of the contempt felt by ordinary working people for the political elite.
For a truly effective anti-corruption regime to be established in Ukraine they may need to return to the soviet election system, as it was first established in 1905 and 1917 – in which elected representatives do not serve a fixed term but can be recalled and forced to stand for re-election by their constituents at any time. Putting political power back into the hands of the working class, as it was briefly following the successful Russian Revolution of 1917, is a big step, and will require more than the current protest vote for Zelensky. He is not the saviour he portrays in the television series.
Taking political power into the hands of the working class will require a social revolution, and the expropriation of the oligarchs who have been robbing the country for decades. Ukraine is in a uniquely fortunate position as the social ownership of the country’s greatest manufacturing assets is a recent memory for the working class. But it will require democratic workers’ control those assets to prevent them becoming under the control of a political bureaucracy with its own agenda.