Local Elections in Ukraine Test Zelensky’s Popularity

Kiev, Oct 25 (AFP/APP): Ukrainians were voting on Sunday in local elections seen as a test for President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose popularity has suffered in the year and a half since he came unexpectedly to power.

Zelensky, a former comedian with no political experience, won a landslide victory in a 2019 presidential election promising to root out corruption and end a war with Russian-backed separatists in the east. His newly created Servant of the People party won an outright majority in a parliament election last year, a record win in the former Soviet republic of around 40 million people. But in the absence of tangible results, Zelensky’s popularity and that of his party has been on the decline.

The vote to elect mayors, local and regional councils is not being held on the Crimea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 or in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine. A poll published this month showed that just 17 percent of voters planned to cast ballots for the Servant of the People party. In close second was a pro-Russian party, Opposition Platform – For Life, with 14 percent, followed by the pro-Western European Solidarity aligned with former leader Petro Poroshenko with 13 percent.

In areas of the eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions that are still controlled by Kiev, only 10 percent of voters planned to vote for Zelensky’s party.

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