Volodymyr Zelensky Is The Only Politician More Postmodern Than Trump- And Perhaps The One To Bring Him Down.
Neither the Democratic nor Republican parties were able to stop Donald Trump in 2016, either in the Republican primary or the general election. Neither could two former FBI directors, sixteen intelligence agencies, or the plurality of American voters who chose Hillary Clinton over him at the ballot box. And yet, Trump now faces the most serious threat to his Presidency ever- with an impeachment inquiry formally announced this week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No, Trump’s downfall- if indeed it comes- will be the result of a conversation he had with a man whose political career was almost perfectly cast in Trump’s own image.
That man would be Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine and perhaps the one world leader whose rise to power was more postmodern than Trump’s own. As the full scope of what Trump attempted to do with regards to the Ukraine, Zelensky, and Joe Biden- allegedly that he threatened to withhold military aid if Zelensky did not investigate Biden’s son’s business activities in the country- becomes clear, this author could do nothing but sit back and laugh at it all. The interaction of these two world leaders represents the final stage in politics’ transformation into theater of the absurd.
If you want to understand who Volodymyr Zelensky is and where he came from, you could do worse than to sit down and watch Netflix. There, you can find episodes of the Ukranian television series Servant of the People, where Zelensky portrays a schoolteacher whose rant against the political establishment goes viral, resulting in him being elected to the Presidency despite having no qualifications whatsoever. Based on the fame his television show garnered him, Zelensky himself then ran for President as a populist political outsider, defeating challengers who had been entrenched in Ukranian politics for decades. Sound familiar?
The parallels with Trump are obvious, but Zelensky went even further than Trump in exploiting his television image to upend his country’s politics. When he formed a new political party to run in the 2019 presidential election, he named it after the television series he had starred in. Even for Donald Trump, running a third party candidacy under the banner of “The Apprentice Party” would have been a bridge too far. Furthermore, the series continued to air right up until close to the elections themselves, with the series finale breaking the fourth wall and urging viewers to vote for Zelensky and his party in real life. Maybe if Trump had looked into the camera from the Apprentice boardroom and said “Hillary, you’re fired,” he might have won the popular vote. That is, if Zelensky’s results are anything to go by.
The actor and former comedian swept away all comers, defeating incumbent Petro Poroshenko by a whopping forty-nine point margin in the second round of the general election. The Ukraine’s political climate takes many of the trends of the current United States and amps them up to eleven. Political parties are widely recognized to be nothing more than vehicles for various oligarchs- Poroshenko’s nickname was “the chocolate king” after the business that made him rich, and his main rival prior to Zelensky entering the race was Yulia Timoshenko, nicknamed “the gas princess.” This is why Zelensky was able to rack up a margin beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams- despite the fact that he, too, was not entirely clean of the country’s oligarchic political tendencies.
The main problem with the image of Zelensky as the anti-corruption, anti-oligarch crusader is that he owes both his career playing an unlikely politician on TV and his subsequent transition into playing one in real life to yet another oligarch. That would be Ihor Kolomyskyi, owner of Privat Bank (Ukraine’s largest bank), as well as, among other things, the television channel that first aired Servant of the People. Kolomoyskyi has also been long rumored to have been involved in darker black market activities, and it has been reported that he finances the neo-Nazi militia known as the Azov battalion. This despite not only being Jewish himself, but President of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine no less.
Kolomoyskyi was initially a supporter of the 2014 Maidan revolution that brought Poroshenko to power, but the two of them subsequently had a rather severe falling out. This lead to the nationalization of Privat Bank, which Kolomoyskyi claims cost him over $2bn. The rise of Zelensky, it has been alleged, is Kolomoyskyi’s revenge against Poroshenko, depriving him of his presidential office and getting his own man in instead. In a final ironic parallel, Zelensky defeated Poroshenko in spite of accusations from the latter that he was insufficiently soft on Russia, which is currently supporting militant separatists in eastern Ukraine. Zelensky has vehemently denied this, reiterating both on the campaign trail and in office that he views Vladimir Putin as an “enemy” (harsher language than Trump has ever used), and supports Ukraine’s accession into NATO and the European Union.
As politics in countries across the world increasingly continues to alienate people with broken promise after broken promise, those who would influence politics will seek to use theater to appeal to their electorates’ baser instincts, while actual change remains elusive. Trump has his own Kolomoyskyis as well, with Steve Bannon, Sheldon Adelson, and others fulfilling the role at various points. Unless there is a drastic political change in the entire western world, politics will continue to just become an escalating set of television presenters bringing their shows into real life, but with little of substance to show for it. Until then, the Zelensky/Trump crossover has just emerged as the Emmy frontrunner for television’s top drama series of 2019- make your predictions now.
