Wedding Photographer Ousts Tycoon as Ukraine Purges Oligarchs in Vote
Wedding Snapper Ousts Tycoon as Ukraine Purges Oligarchs in Vote
(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian voters finally had enough.
Frustrated at a parliament stacked with millionaire businessmen, they backed little-known candidates from all walks of life -- including a wedding photographer, a fitness-club director, an anesthesiologist and more than a dozen without stable work -- to unexpectedly hand an anti-establishment party the country’s first-ever ruling majority.
Servant of the People, led by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, clinched more than 226 seats in Sunday’s election on a pledge to crack down on endemic corruption, fix the economy and end a half-decade-long conflict with Russian-backed separatists. Like Zelenskiy, a former comedian, many of the party’s members had no political experience before scoring a series of shock victories in Sunday’s snap vote.
The sweep deals a blow to the array of oligarchs, celebrities and politicians’ relatives who’ve traditionally piled into parliament in the almost three decades since the fall of communism. Armed with their own agendas, they’ve complicated governments’ efforts to enact policies. Zelenskiy has pledged to revoke automatic immunity from prosecution for lawmakers, a perk pro-democracy activists say has filled the assembly with figures whose main motive is to avoid jail.
“The voters’ choices were rather emotional than rational,” Viktor Zamyatin, an analyst at the Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies in Kiev, said by phone Tuesday. “In many cases, people didn’t know the electoral programs, or even the candidates at all. But they hope the new faces will be able to make changes for better.”
In one of the most high-profile upsets, 45-year-old mining billionaire Kostyantin Zhevago, who enjoys significant influence in regions where his plants provide thousands of jobs, lost to a 25-year-old civil servant focusing on fighting corruption in state procurement. In the south-eastern Zaporizhzhya region, 29-year-old Serhiy Shtepa, a wedding photographer, defeated 80-year-old millionaire Vyacheslav Boguslayev, the owner of engine maker Motor Sich PJSC.
Most of the upsets were delivered by candidates affiliated with Servant of the People, which was named after the television show -- bought by Netflix -- that catapulted Zelenskiy to the national stage in which he played a high-school history teacher thrust into the position of head of state.
In one case, Ukrainian media could list only the few details that candidate Oleh Voronko was required to provide -- an entrepreneur, 45-years-old -- after he beat both the candidate from a pro-Russian party and a wealthy agriculture businessman and soccer-club owner.
Ihor Kononenko, a business partner of billionaire former President Petro Poroshenko, lost to a journalist. Bohdan Dubnevych, an influential agriculture and rail businessman from the western Lviv region, was beaten by a candidate of the two-month-old Holos party, which is run by Ukraine’s most popular rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk.
Servant of the People has said that the party’s widespread lack of knowledge about how to make laws and run the government isn’t a problem. It has hired teachers from the Kiev School of Economics to train its new lawmakers to start at the end of the week, the school’s president, Tymofiy Milovanov, said by phone.
“Each of the roughly 250 people is expected to attend,” Milovanov said.
--With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.
To contact the reporter on this story: Volodymyr Verbyany in Kiev at vverbyany1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net, Michael Winfrey
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