Zelenskyy’s programme was so vague, and his rhetoric could be interpreted in so many ways — everyone was putting in him their own ideas and dreams. His party was also a mishmash of them with no coherent political philosophy uniting it.
The Zelenskyy government isn’t so different from standard Central and Eastern European options. However, its platform and the way it was elected were much more inclusive and much less national conservative than the majority of politicians in Ukraine and in neighbouring countries.
It was that actually it had no comprehensive programme, and it was just really, in a way, adapting to mainstream ways of doing politics here.
In speaking about its class nature, it’s quite important to note that every Ukrainian government in the history of independent Ukraine was pro-business, especially after President Kuchma consolidated oligarchic capitalism. Ukraine has its very powerful oligarchs of its own, it’s not as dominated by multinationals as several of its Western neighbours, though our oligarchs are also part of transnational capitalism, often residing and hiding their capital in places like London.
Each government represented this oligarchic consensus, conducting economic so-called “reforms” firstly with privatisation in the interests of the national capital. There is a constant mantra about investors that we should “attract more foreign investors” and so on. But the majority of investors up to this moment still comprise the same Ukrainian oligarchs coming via different offshore tax havens like Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands or the Netherlands.
Zelenskyy’s campaign attacked different aspects of the Poroshenko government. But the team that was in charge of the neoliberal reforms under Poroshenko was mostly inherited by Zelenskyy. His minister of finance, Marchenko, was very afraid of the idea that we should write off or freeze the Ukrainian debt because it would frighten investors…
This is the same guy who was the deputy minister in the government under Poroshenko and who was behind the cuts in education drastically stripping students of their stipends. This manifestation of austerity sparked protests, and activists of our organisation then attacked this neoliberal politician with a pie.
Zelenskyy’s circle was connected with different capitalist interests, for example his campaign was at first supported by the notorious oligarch Kolomoisky. His first Prime Minister was the person favoured by the multinational capital. His second and the current Prime Minister used to work under the oligarchic structures of the richest person in Ukraine, Akhmetov.
So we see that there is a continuity. It’s a neoliberal effort and it’s driven both by the external factors, the demands of international financial institutions, for example, loans for their packages; and by the internal factors, because we have all these so-called economic experts who are essentially market fundamentalists and who are in many ways more eager to introduce more austerity, more anti-labour reforms, more deregulation than even the IMF itself.
There have been some shifts however. This government has been described as an uprising of millionaires against billionaires.
Though Zelenskyy was initially supported by Kolomoisky, there are rumours Zelenskyy has stripped him of Ukrainian citizenship as the oligarch’s corruption is investigated in the US. It seems that the government is representing the interests of smaller big capitalists. This is also indicated on the horizon of their economic thinking and planning.
They lack ideas for big industry and big chains of production. They think of more medium sized business needs, for instance legalising gambling. And, of course, they neglect the interests and demands of the working class and labour in general. Among the ruling party MPs, there’s a handful of extreme neoliberals like Tretyakova who aim at dismantling the entire welfare, labour and social protections system.
This represents their own class background that many of them come from — middle bourgeoisie or groups of bigger capital not so prominent and not so politically involved as the big oligarchs.
A year ago, Zelenskyy initiated the adoption of several laws that were aimed at de-oligarchisation.
His legislators tried to put in an impossible framework. A certain number of people will be designated as oligarchs, and if you are an official oligarch then there’re certain controls over you restricting your direct involvement in political parties and the media market. They didn’t target the primary cause of the problems: that the oligarchs obtained their wealth in this illegal way during the post-Soviet privatisation processes. To address the core issue, we need to confiscate property from these oligarchs. And so the policy is still promoting, in general, the interests of this oligarchy and capitalism. Without expropriation, and with the continuation of privatisation, there cannot be real “de-oligarchisation”.
So, in a way, yes, this is a continuation of a very pro-capitalist, pro-market policy, shaped by the class perspective that is driven by the people who agree to get rid of the complete control of big oligarchs, but only to replace them with a bigger number of smaller ones. In this, their interests may coincide with some of multinational capitalists who want to get more access to the Ukrainian economy, Ukrainian markets and Ukrainian resources. We can say this is this conjuncture of smaller big capital inside Ukraine and some international institutions, primarily financial.
• Denys Pilash is a member of the Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialniy Rukh (Social Movement)
Comments?We welcome replies, corrections and debate pieces. Contact us