April 21, 2019
By Carl Schreck
...In the end, (click here) it was a demand for radical change and broad disappointment with the incumbent that vaulted a comedian who played Ukraine’s president on television into the real thing.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy rode these sentiments, political analysts and sociologists say, to what was shaping up to be an unprecedented landslide victory over President Petro Poroshenko in the country’s April 21 runoff vote.
“The absolute majority of Ukrainians again, just as they did five years ago, want radical political change. In that sense, this was a kind of Maidan -- but an electoral one,” Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told RFE/RL, referring to the central Kyiv square at the heart of the 2013-14 protests that helped oust Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and paved the way for Poroshenko’s election....
