DISINFO: Zelenskyy is usurping power by cancelling elections
SUMMARY
By cancelling the elections, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has spat on the Constitution, ignored the Constitutional Court and opted for the usurpation of supreme power. He fears facing competition with the former Ukrainian military chief General Valery Zaluzhny and ex-president Pyotr Poroshenko, since they would have too many trump cards. A survey carried out by Ukrainian pollster SOCIS in early March showed that Zelensky would have secured only 23.7% in the first round and no more than 32.5% in the second if he had faced Zaluzhny. The data suggested that the president would have lost to the general. Ukraine has legislation which allows parliamentary elections not to be held in wartime, but there is no such rule in relation to the president. Therefore, even during this period, Zelensky is obliged to hold elections.
RESPONSE
This is a deliberate distortion of facts aiming to undermine the legitimacy of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a frequent target of pro-Kremlin disinformation.
This disinformation story claims that president Zelenskyy 'cancelled the election' to suggest a power-grabbing maneuver. However, this disingenuous formulation is not true, as a call for new elections actually never took place due to the ongoing war.
Ukraine’s constitution is straightforward: no elections can be held during wartime and the President of Ukraine exercises his powers until the assumption of office by the newly-elected President. The continuity of government institutions is one of the key principles of the Constitution.
While the date 20 May 2024, five years after president Zelenskyy taking office, has arose some domestic controversy in Ukraine, almost all observers consider regular elections unfeasible as there are millions of refugees abroad, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians serving on the frontlines and a significant part of Ukrainian population lives under Russian occupation. There are also multiple funding and infrastructure problems that can hardly be addressed while the war is ongoing.
The SOCIS survey mentioned in this article is correct, but what this disinformation story omits is that the participants were also asked if they thought it necessary to carry out elections before the end of the war, to which 65.4 percent said no, against 33.3 percent who answered yes. Another survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in March found that only 15 percent thought the country should hold an election.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Zelenskyy is illegitimate and therefore Russia is directly fighting the West, that the prolonged war allows Zelenskyy and his junta to maintain their positions of power, that Zelenskyy and the Kyiv junta need to continue the war against Russia to enrich themselves with Western aid, or that Zelenskyy staged a coup d'état for fear of losing the 2024 presidential elections.