The Presidential Vlog: Trust and the Celebritization of Politics in Ukraine

Abstract

Comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, popular in Ukraine for playing the president on TV, shocked many commentators when he was elected president in reality. Of particular interest however, is the scope of his victory and style of his campaign. Zelenskyy was touted as being the first presidential candidate whose campaign was entirely digital. That is, he communicated with supporters and the public at large entirely through his social media platforms, most notably in his YouTube campaign vlog: Ze!President. But Zelenskyy’s victory is most peculiar given the democratic context in which it occurred. He was the first Ukrainian presidential candidate to unite the electorate in the country’s independent history, as Ukraine’s regions are typically electorally divided. Further, before his election Ukrainians reported the lowest levels of trust in the government in the world. Yet Zelenskyy garnered the highest ratings of trust a Ukrainian president has ever received. On its face, his victory appears merely to be confirmation of what scholars describe as the celebritization of politics: a candidate-centric shift in the political landscape facilitated by the culture of social media. I argue that Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s election reveals an underappreciated dynamic of celebritization: political trust. I argue that Volodymyr Zelenskyy gained the trust of the electorate by maintaining the image of a uniquely authentic Ukrainian patriot through airing an episodic documentary of the campaign on YouTube. While his particular brand of patriotism was made up of an inclusive populism and embrace of cultural-hybridity, an analysis of Zelenskyy’s image constructed via the vlog serves to convince the audience that his patriotism is truly authentic; thus, trustworthy. Ultimately, these findings indicate that political celebritization may be driven by dwindling trust in government, and that in such environments, citizens display such interest in the personal profiles of political leaders in order to scrutinize them for authenticity.