Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
As U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA ideologues cascade a litany of alternative facts, accuracy isn’t high on their list of priorities. So is the case with their current clamor for Ukraine to hold elections, as well as their attempt to label Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy an autocrat who has no legitimacy to govern because he hasn’t faced voters for a while.
Their arguments are wide of the mark and disturbingly aligned with Moscow’s narrative — as is Trump blaming Ukraine for starting the war. A claim that earned him a scolding from former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who likened it to claiming “America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.”
Holding elections while Ukraine actively fights an existential war would do nothing to buttress the country or strengthen its democracy — quite the reverse. It would needlessly imperil Ukrainian cohesion and leave the country highly vulnerable to Russian influence campaigns, corroding resolve and setting Ukrainian against Ukrainian.
This is why even the Ukrainian leader’s fiercest political critics, including Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, former President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are vociferously opposed to holding elections before the fighting ends, and why they’re now rallying behind Zelenskyy.
They and other opposition politicians have long critiqued the Ukrainian leader’s highly personalized and high-handed way of governing, including his centralization of power and dependence on a clam-like inner circle of trusted friends and advisers, and they have slammed him for power grabs. Klitschko has long demanded Zelenskyy consider expanding his government, stop relying on a tight coterie of advisers and loyalists, and form a government of national unity instead. A government that’s able to draw from a bigger pool of Ukraine’s best and brightest.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, Klitschko, like many others, fears a wartime election and the destabilization Moscow would aim to foment with hybrid attacks, much as it did elsewhere in Europe — most recently in the suspicious Romanian election that threw the country into a constitutional crisis. An election campaign could “destroy the country from within,” Klitschko warned during a visit to Brussels last week.
No doubt, that’s exactly why the Kremlin is pushing for it. And it’s hard not to judge that Trump’s alignment with the Kremlin on this isn’t out of any genuine fear over the state of Ukrainian democracy, but rather to throw the country into disarray, weaken Zelenskyy and make it easier to foist a bad peace deal on Kyiv.
Of course, Trump isn’t admitting to any of that.
“A Dictator without Elections,” is how the U.S. president described Zelenskyy in a social media post last week — a statement that breezily overlooks the fact that Zelenskyy pulled off a remarkable landslide win prior to Russia’s unprovoked invasion, and received a much larger share of the popular vote than Trump accomplished in either of his campaign victories. That must sting.
It also ignores Ukrainian rule of law. Under Ukraine’s constitution, elections are suspended while martial law is in effect, so that the country can better focus on defending itself. Elections had, indeed, been due last year, but as Germany’s outgoing chancellor noted: “It is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelenskyy’s democratic legitimacy. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the elected head of state of Ukraine. The fact that proper elections cannot be held in the middle of a war is in line with the requirements of the Ukrainian constitution and electoral laws. No one should claim otherwise.”
Moreover, Trump presenting himself as a champion of democracy is jarring. It sits oddly with a man who conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. election and has now closed all USAID and State Department-funded democracy promotion programs — the origins of which date back to 1983, when then U.S. President Ronald Reagan established the National Endowment for Democracy. Trump didn’t even mention the word democracy once in his inaugural address last month.
Democracy wasn’t on his mind back in 2018 either, when he fulsomely congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his reelection in a Soviet-style managed “contest” of ballot stuffing, forced voting and the exclusion of credible opponents like Alexei Navalny. It was a move that prompted a withering rebuke from then-Senator John McCain, who chastised Trump, saying: “An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.”
Practicality speaking, seasoned election experts are clear that it would simply be unfeasible to hold elections in Ukraine while the country fights for survival under constant bombardment and attack — and with a substantial portion of its population displaced, overseas or on the front lines. “Ukraine should hold its next elections at a time when the country can guarantee the security and democratic standards of those elections. [This] cannot be guaranteed during the current all-out war,” said Peter Erben and Gio Kobakhidze of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems non-profit.
Historically, this has been the case in other democracies during wartime — despite the opposite claim made by Special Envoy Keith Kellogg. Britain didn’t hold elections from 1935 to 1945, and no one questioned the legitimacy of then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill. New Zealand didn’t hold elections during World War II either. Elections were also postponed in Britain and Canada during World War 1, and Israel delayed elections during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
So, it’s more than fair to assume, as Ukrainian politicians do, that Trump targeting Zelenskyy has nothing to do with genuine solicitude for the health of Ukraine’s democracy. Former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was immediately apprehensive when Kellogg first broached the topic several weeks before Trump made his full-throated call, telling POLITICO he saw it as the “first evidence that Trump and Putin agree that they want Zelenskyy out.” Now, that’s become even clearer.
According to former Deputy Prime Minister Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, elections at this juncture would imperil Ukraine — especially as the country tries to get some purchase on the negotiations between Trump and Putin that it’s being shut out of, and debates what exactly would constitute an acceptable peace deal. That debate will be fractious and even ferocious, and as Klympush-Tsintsadze told POLITICO, it isn’t clear whether parliament would endorse a poor deal forced on the country, even if it was reluctantly backed by Zelenskyy. She also anticipates uproar.
Asked if there could be protests against a bad deal or problems with the army, she replied: “Yes, that might be the case.” And amid all that uproar, with tempers running high, the Kremlin would have a field day.
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