There was a time, not very long ago, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was lionized around the world and spectacularly popular at home. But, if elections were held today, he would struggle to finish in the top three.
Zelensky came to power in a landslide victory in 2019. His term, constitutionally limited to five years, has now stretched to over seven years because of the war. Although it is true that 57 percent of Ukrainians say they do not want to hold elections during the war, it is simply not true that it is unconstitutional to hold presidential elections until the fighting stops.
The western media has provided cover for Zelensky by reporting that presidential elections are not permitted by Ukraine’s constitution at time of war. But while Ukrainian law prohibits parliamentary, presidential, and local elections under martial law, the highest law in the land, the Ukrainian constitution (Article 83), speaks only of the parliament as being able to extend its authority in the event that martial law is declared and elections cannot be held. It pointedly says nothing about extending the term of the president.
This omission was deliberate: The authors of the constitution feared that some future president might declare martial law precisely to prevent removal from office. Indeed, Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, was accused by three former presidents of Ukraine of trying this very maneuver in late 2018 in order to derail the elections that he later lost.
Setting aside tricky legal matters, where do things stand politically? Were elections to be held today, three key metrics suggest that Zelensky would suffer a similar devastating loss.
The most obvious is recent polling. Only 28 percent of Ukrainians say they want to see Zelensky remain president after the war. Other recent polls show that only around 21 percent of Ukrainians would vote for him in the next election—putting Zelensky just one point ahead of his rival, former Commander-in-Chief Valeriy Zaluzhny—while other polling suggests that Zelensky would lose to Zaluzhny. Meanwhile, a number of “closed polls,” those commissioned by the government for internal use only, apparently show that he would probably lose to Kyrylo Budanov, the former intelligence chief and Zelensky’s current chief of staff.
The second metric may be even more important. Current polling shows that no candidate would win the required majority in the first round, thus necessitating a runoff round. Since he has the highest number of Ukrainians who say they would not vote for him under any circumstances, one can infer that Zelensky would be soundly defeated in this round under any scenario. A recent poll indicates that Zaluzhny would defeat him by a margin of 66 to 34 percent; Budanov would defeat him by 60 to 40 percent; and even the recently fired minister of defense, Mykhailo Fedorov, would beat him by a whopping 64 to 36 percent.
The third metric is trust. In an ever-shifting field of hypothetical candidates, how much Ukrainians trust their candidate may be the most important question of all. And here, Zelensky does even worse. When the question is trust, Zelensky places a distant sixth.
Zaluzhny comes in first with 28 percent of respondents fully trusting him, 37 percent trusting him somewhat, 12 percent somewhat distrusting him, and 18 percent not trusting him at all. Fedorov and Budanov are more trusted than Zelensky, as are Mykhailo Drapatyi, the current commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, and even Robert Brovdi, commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces. Only 18 percent say they fully trust Zelensky and 25 percent somewhat trust him, while 37 percent say they do not trust him at all.
Government corruption is a big reason for Zelensky’s collapse. A fifth of those who say they do not trust him cite corruption as the main reason, and 59 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky personally for the extent of corruption in Ukraine today. And this perception is unlikely to change for the better, as new corruption scandals are exposed. They already reach deep into Zelensky’s inner circle and personal staff. Last year, these scandals took out Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. More recently, they have hit three deputy chiefs of staff and Yermak’s successor, Budanov, not to mention several government ministers and Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.
Popular reluctance, as well as the logistics of holding elections under the strain of war, will prevent elections from taking place any time soon. But when this horrible war finally ends and Ukrainians return to the polls, if democracy is permitted a full and unimpeded voice, then Zelensky, Ukraine’s acclaimed wartime president, will probably not be its peacetime president.
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