‘Not fighting corruption, but defeating it’: the populism of Zelensky’s Servant of the People in comparative perspective

Research on populism is more abundant than ever, but the Ukrainian case is usually neglected in the comparative literature. This article fills this gap by providing a systematic analysis of the populism of Zelensky’s Servant of the People (SN) at the time of its electoral breakthrough in 2019, and it does so by adopting a broader European perspective. We argue that the success of Zelensky’s SN in 2019 should not be interpreted as something idiosyncratic or country-specific. On the contrary, we show that Zelensky’s SN is the Ukrainian manifestation of valence populism, a populism variety typically found in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). By combining qualitative and quantitative evidence, the analysis reveals that Zelensky’s SN, like the other valence populists in the CEE region, focused its agenda on non-positional topics, such as anti-corruption appeals, political transparency and moral integrity. At the same time, similarly to the other valence populist parties, the positions of Zelensky’s SN on economic and socio-cultural issues were intentionally blurry and elusive, to reach a broader group of voters. The conceptualization of SN suggested in the article allows for a better integration of the Ukrainian case into future comparative research on populism.