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Monday, April 1, 2019

A Bit Of The Bizarre -- The Ukrainian Presidential Election

The results are almost complete in the Ukrainian presidential election.  Ukrainian voters have not given a majority to any of the many candidates, so there will be a run off election between the top two vote getters.  The second place finisher, Poroshenko, is the current president, but he was only able to garner about 16% of the total vote.  No surprise there.  What is most surprising, though, is the identity of the first place finisher.  He is Volodyrmyr Zelensky.  He is also a comedian who plays the president of Ukraine on a popular TV show.  He is also a first time political candidate who has based his campaign on running to stamp out the corruption which is, apparently, commonplace in Ukraine.

Zelensky has no political party behind him.  He has gotten about 40% of the vote just because he is truly something different.  It will be very interesting to see if Zelensky can hold the lead in the runoff.  Remember, 60% of the voters went with someone else with political experience.  Zelensky is lucky that the second place finisher was the incumbent.  Perhaps he can make this into a choice between change and no change.  If so, he will surely win; 84% of the voters chose change in the first round.

This is going to be interesting to watch.

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