Today, Explained - The other TV president

Episode Date: January 2, 2020

Before stumbling into the biggest American political scandal in a generation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was best known for playing the president on TV. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy New Year! 2020, the year of, I don't know, really good vision? The year of the Barbara Walters? These jokes are gonna get old really fast. You know what hasn't gotten old yet? The one time President Trump called up President Zelensky in Ukraine and asked him to investigate the Bidens. You might remember, it got President Trump impeached last year. His Senate trial is proximate. Anyway, back in April, before the world really knew the name Zelensky, we did an episode all about the guy on the other end of that phone call because his story is incredible. And because we're still taking a little tiny well-deserved break from daily podcasting,

we are serving up that episode again today. You're welcome. Okay, crazy news out of Ukraine. Before we get into it, can I have you say your name and how you want us to ID you on the show? My name is Vladislav Davitsyn. I am a Russian-American journalist and editor. I am based in Ukraine and France and between Paris and Kiev. And I am the chief of the Odessa Review, a fine journal of culture and policy. And I an expert on ukrainian and eastern european politics so we had an election here in ukraine which i monitor as an election monitor which is a historical election ukraine's president petro poroshenko was voted out of election. Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko was voted out of office after five years for a few different

reasons and the Ukrainian voters by an overwhelming majority has put into power an amateur comedian television actor into the presidential chair. By a landslide. Yes, on Sunday night, I watched the results, as did all the other journalists and analysts covering the elections. It was between 72 and 74.5% projected that Volodymyr Zelensky received in the count. I'm feeling good, thank you. Thank you, everybody. And who is this gentleman?

This gentleman is a 41-year-old actor, a comedian. He is a guy who plays the president on TV. It's as if Martin Sheen, after having played President Bartlett on the West Wing, was elected to that exact same office. I hope that by the time we're done with our four years here, we'll have seen to it that every young person who chooses can go to college and beyond, regardless of their economic status. But also having included subplots within the show being part of the actual campaign

with a wink and a nod to the electorate. So for those people who haven't seen the show, what was the president he played on TV like? He plays a history teacher from the outskirts of Kiev who makes a kind of profane curse-filled speech to the Ukrainian population about the elites and the oligarchs and how bad they are. And then he has that speech taped by one of the students who uploads it to the internet. And a crowdsourced campaign takes place.

And he becomes a president of Ukraine without really trying. Being a very clean and pure fellow who represents the spirit of the people. An ordinary man of the street who becomes the president by accident. How did he become a president in real life? Did someone say, hey, you're really good at doing that thing on TV, you want to try at IRL? Yeah, he ran for the presidency, started his campaign on the same exact television station on which the show had aired. He was backed by a Ukrainian oligarch, a very profane and funny fellow by the name of Mr. Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky, a banking, energy and media tycoon with a fortune put at $1.8 billion by Forbes last year, who owns one of the biggest television stations in Ukraine.

So Zelensky had a powerful backer and a familiar face. Was that it? Did he think he could win? I honestly think that he never, ever expected to go this far. I think that he was what we call a technical candidate in Ukraine, a candidate that was deployed to siphon off votes from another candidate, a more serious candidate. I think that he expected to win 10, 12, 14 percent in the first round of a presidential campaign and then go on into the parliamentary elections in October. And then he'd win 25, 30 seats in the parliament and that he would be a member of parliament and have his own guys in the parliament. But I don't think he ever expected the president. He was massively successful, I think more successful than anyone ever expected. Himself, his backers, the president, the entire population.

He was never supposed to go this far. You've actually sat down with him, right? What's he like? I'm one of the few journalists or policy analysts or anybody really to sit down with him. He does not really give interviews. He is surprisingly very macho. He's not a very big guy. He must be about five foot five. He is very muscular, very slim. He obviously lifts weights. He is psychologically and emotionally extraordinarily intelligent and sizes up people very, very, very quickly. He has not really talked about what he actually intends to do for the most part with some small exceptions and in terms of policy. So he represents, I think, different things to different people. And he hasn't really dissuaded people from the fact that he doesn't really

believe what they might think he believes, right? And he's Jewish. Is that significant for Ukraine? It's amazing. I'm actually someone who works on the Jewish-Ukrainian relationship a lot. I myself am Jewish. I'm a Russian-Jewish-American. And this is the second country after Israel, which has both a Jewish prime minister and a Jewish president-elect at this moment. It's utterly remarkable in that way. This is the cradle of Jewish civilization in many ways, of Ashkenazi Jewish civilization. But only about a third of 1% of the population are of Jewish descent. He is not religious. He has openly spoken about his Jewish identity in the public sphere. He would say things like, I am of Jewish blood, Russian culture, and Ukrainian patriotism.

And everyone here knew that he was a Jew. And no one cared about it, I think, for the most part. And that is really an indicator of the fact that this country has changed in a lot of ways. And anti-Semitism is not really a big deal here. Tell me about the campaign. He was running against the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko. What was it like? He didn't really campaign at all because I don't think he really has much grasp of policy issues.

So he basically just kept giving comedy shows. And he challenged the president to a debate in a stadium, which was basically not unlike a boxing match. I am not a politician. I am not a politician at all. I am just a human being, an ordinary human being,

who has come to break this system. I am the result, Petro Poroshenko, of your mistakes and promises. Including a drug test that both sides agreed to before the match. What? Yeah, he demanded that the sitting president take a drug test before he would debate him. Petro Poroshenko gave his analysis on live television in front of journalists. He also signed a document allowing for the results to be released, but only regarding drugs and alcohol.

How did they do on their drug tests? The presidential administration had to release a press release saying that the sitting president of Ukraine was not taking LSD or anything related to hallucinogenic narcotics. And then when Mr. Zelensky, now President-elect Zelensky, took this test, it was in a drug clink that a friend of his owned, who's actually a bit actor in one of his skits. What?

Yeah. Yes, I donated blood. Everything, all the blood they needed, they pumped out of me. I have a lot of blood, thank goodness. The blood is young. The presidential administration spread rumors that he was a drug addict, that he was doing coke all the time, that he was a cocaine addict. Obviously, I was never there, you know, snorting cocaine with him, but that's what the presidential administration was intimating that he was doing. So why did people ultimately vote for him? Because he was funny? Because he was fresh, because he was famous, all of the above? What? First of all, Ukraine is in the midst of a economic situation where

after the war was started by the Russians, after the Russians invaded, the economy collapsed. We have 1.1 million internally displaced people from the war in the East and the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia. At the same time, it is an economic crisis as well. It's 20% of our economy. And people's life savings evaporated. And after that happened, the Ukrainian population gritted their teeth and waited for a long time for things to get better. And things are getting better. The economy are getting better. The economy is growing at 3% a year, but people aren't feeling it. So there's a lot of oligarchs also who have television stations which kept pumping propaganda

to the population that things are really bad and the president's on the take and corrupt. And whether that's true or not, and he is a billionaire and he is an oligarch and that's true and he is making money, and he didn't stop making money during the course of the war. How did it happen that Ukraine has practically the poorest government with the richest president in history? So there's just so much pent-up rage and frustration with the presidential administration of Mr. Poroshenko that people voted against him. So you could have put up maybe a penguin or a camel or a dog or a random person and they would have won this election. I could have won this election. You could have won this election. If your name was put up against the president, you would have won.

It is a total and utter and axiomatic and categoric humiliation for a sitting president. Vladislav, we haven't talked about Russia yet. How does Russia feel about all of this? So the Russians, obviously, it's a big deal because they really want a weak Ukraine and they want Ukraine to return to the Russian sphere of influence. President Poroshenko lost because he was not good on internal stuff. But on the external relationship with the Russians in terms of Ukrainian nationalism and the Ukrainian nation, he was very solid. So President Putin and the Kremlin really didn't like him,

and they were happy, I think, very, very happy to have anybody else come to power, including an inexperienced young guy who's never worked in politics and has no experience of holding public office, who will certainly, almost certainly make mistakes, and who is set to have a chaotic and perhaps even weak presidency for at least the first year. Has Zelensky said anything about his intentions with Russia? Does he have a firm position, a plan? Look, he has said all the right things from the standpoint of the Ukrainian elections,

and he's been fairly belligerent in his rhetoric. Certainly not as belligerent as President Petro Poroshenko, but he has said the things that you would expect him to say. Why is Ukraine's relationship with Russia so important? Well, look, Ukraine is one of the biggest countries in Europe. It's a strategically, geopolitically, politically, economically important country. And what happens here has a direct effect on, you know, the NATO and the East European defense posture. And Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire,

and then it was part of the Soviet Union. Happily, unhappily, that's a different question. But it's a country that has never been independent except for three years in the last 300 years. Does that make sense? Yeah. Do you think Russia will look at this inexperienced, fun actor who had his buddy do his own drug test that he called for and see some low-hanging fruit to go in and just walk all over this guy? Look, these guys are really, really tough, to put it mildly.

And they will look at this guy and will say, this guy is weak this guy is inexperienced and we might use the opportunity to press our advantage that could mean anything from a diplomatic campaign to a full-scale invasion and certainly there's a huge risk to the ukrainians that the election of a young guy who's not had any kind of experience in this kind of thing before might lead to more aggression in one way or another from Russia. You know, I hate to make everything about the United States, but it just seems so comparable that people were thinking, oh, this guy, he doesn't have experience, but he can do it. At least in the United States, people could say, oh, Donald Trump, he doesn't have experience, but he can do it. At least in the United States, people could say, oh, Donald Trump, he's got business experience, I guess. Maybe he can run

the country. This guy, he's got acting experience. Maybe he could run the country. It seems even more far-fetched. Did they look at the United States and go, oh, that's working out well. Let's try that. Yeah, I'm not sure if they actually looked at the model in order to say, oh, that's a great thing. It's not quite the same as Donald Trump because he, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not really a populist in the Western European sense because he has not taken any right-wing or ultra right-wing positions. It's actually much more like Reagan than it is like President Trump. But Reagan ran the state of California, the biggest state in the union, for years before he became president.

Yeah, that's true. In the way that he is like Reagan, he is an actor who has a role that he played on TV that he's actually playing in politics now. He's just a guy who represents an opposition to the elite. And the elite here is really nasty and corrupt. It's not the same as it is in America, where people pay their taxes. And, you know, it's just very different. It's a really extraordinarily corrupt country. And people are really angry. So there are a lot of people who are promising an end to that. It's not only him. But the question is, I guess, can he do it? Can this guy with literally no political experience, who didn't think he could win, who was, you know, instituting all these stunts during the campaign,

can he fix a country with deep rootedrooted issues regarding corruption and influence? And, oh, and he was backed by an oligarch, right? I mean... Yeah, he was totally backed by an oligarch. Actually, everyone who comes to power here is either of themselves an oligarch or backed by an oligarch. Fair.

So there's really no way to come to power if you don't have oligarchic connections, money, and television stations. That's the most important thing. It's really a corrupt country and things are really based on, you know, 15, 20 people fighting between themselves and arguing between themselves, right? It's a really complicated situation that way. That said, can he do it? I think it'll be extraordinarily difficult for him because politics here is so cutthroat and so shark-like that he will be eaten alive by the really cynical and vicious smart oligarchs positioning themselves to take stuff from him. He'll have the Russians. He'll have an ongoing war. He'll have poverty to deal with. It's an

extraordinarily difficult situation for any president to deal with, let alone a young gentleman who's never done anything in politics. So can he do it? You know, he can do little things. And if he has a very strong team of reformers, maybe he'll surprise us. But it's a really, really, really steep hill to climb. Do you think because Zelensky didn't think he had a chance to win, really wants this job? Do you think he might be terrified of actually doing this now that he's won the office? I really, I'm really wondering myself, is he terrified?

Why wouldn't he be? How could you not be terrified in this situation? If he fails, he will bring forth another popular revolution. And if that happens, this country will probably see the collapse of economy and even invasion by the regular forces of the Russian army taking large chunks of territory. How could you not be terrified if you're a rational person in that situation? We're going to find out for the rest of Europe and the rest of the world if voting for a television candidate, social media candidate actually gets what you want, or you're always unhappy even with that. It's, for me, the next chapter of democracy by television.

It's something that Americans and the British people and the French for a certain point have pioneered, but the Ukrainians are going to teach us what the actual final frontier of this experiment is. And in many ways, the experiments in democracy and disinformation and propaganda that have taken place here have been exported to the West. And it is an extraordinarily important story for Americans and Western Europeans to understand.

Vladislav Davidson is a Russian-American journalist and editor. He is based in Ukraine and France and between Paris and Kiev. And he is the chief of the Odessa Review, a fine journal of culture and policy. And he is an expert on Ukrainian and Eastern European politics. A lot of the translation you heard in today's episode was done by today explains engineer Afim the Dream Shapiro. Спасибо Сэру Шану Рамесферму, ведущему подкаста «Сегодня и что оно означает». Главный продюсер «Сегодня и что оно означает» Айрин Ногучи. Редактор, а иногда продюсер, Бриджит Маккарти.

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