Virtually all Ukrainian elections reanimate a three-decade long debate about the country’s identity split and its discernible impact on voters’ political preferences. The 2019 presidential election has largely confirmed this pattern but also brought to the fore a different dividing line – that runs across the traditional one and makes the electoral fields of frontrunners quite often overlapping and mixed. This new line separates manifestly the old, presumably corrupt political class and the new, presumably decent leaders. The latter come, however, not from civil society but from the virtual space of popular TV shows. It remains to be seen whether these new leaders will associate themselves with civil society and push through much-needed reforms, or will merely serve as a cover-up for the competing oligarchic clans. Be this at it may, the 2019 election indicates that identity-related issues have ceased to be the primary factor of political mobilization, while the issue of national modernization has become decisive.
Mykola Riabchuk
is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Nationalities’ Studies, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw and Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Dr. Riabchuk penned several books and many articles on civil society, state/nation building, nationalism, national identity, and postcommunist transition in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine. Five of his books were translated into Polish and one into French (
De la petit Russie a l’Ukraine
, 2003), German (
Die reale und die imaginierte Ukraine
, 2005), and Hungarian (
A ket Ukraina
, 2015). Currently, he is a visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
4:00-5:30 pm
Voesar Conference Room, Suite 412
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E St NW
