“He’s doomed to not be loved!”
Never was there a more clear-cut case of “commentator’s curse” than when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated on a sunny Kyiv day exactly five years ago.
The TV narrator’s inference was that, after a landslide election victory with 73% of the vote, it could only go downhill for him.
While his approval ratings have inevitably waned, Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to use his enduring appeal, along with a desire for stability, to extend his term in office.
In peacetime it would have expired, and an election would have been called. But the martial law brought in with Russia’s full-scale invasion means that can’t happen, and there’s broad public support for that too.
“For the Ukrainians, the priority is to win the war and then have an election,” explains Anton Hrushetskyi, the head of Kyiv’s International Institute of Sociology.
“Therefore, they don’t question the legitimacy of Zelensky.”
Moscow, unsurprisingly, has done just that. But it would also jump on a mid-war election where Ukraine’s wartime leader would be heavily scrutinised.
Read more at BBC.com
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