Volodymyr Zelenskyy: flirting with authoritarianism?

"Volodymyr Zelenskyy just betrayed Ukraine's democracy – and everyone fighting for it," said The Kyiv Independent. Last week, our president signed into law a bill that would have stripped two of the country's top anti-corruption bodies of their independence. He then backtracked, but only after thousands had taken to the streets (the first protests since Russia invaded in 2022), and after the EU had issued a rare and embarrassing rebuke, saying the proposed law could jeopardise Ukraine's bid to join the bloc.

Why would Zelenskyy choose to "squander his political capital" in this way, asked Andreas Rüesch in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). Abroad, Ukraine's wartime president is a hero. But domestically, "he's proven himself for years to be a politician with unforgivable weaknesses", a man who has tried to consolidate power and allowed his allies to carry out "undemocratic manoeuvres". The official reason for the bill was that Russia was influencing anti-corruption investigators. In reality, those investigators had probably "targeted too many of Zelenskyy's political friends".

This whole affair only reaffirms something the EU has known for years, said Anna-Lena Laurén in Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), but has "chosen to keep quiet about" so as not to undermine the country's fight for survival: "corruption continues to be a major problem in Ukraine". In the military industrial complex in particular, "it is rampant", said Timothy Ash in the Kyiv Post, with insiders skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars from contracts for aeroplane wheels and the like. There's nothing to suggest Zelenskyy himself is "personally corrupt", or that Ukrainians "are more amenable to corruption" than others. It's just an ugly symptom of the "post-Soviet transition".

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Zelenskyy may not be corrupt, said Michael Bociurkiw in the same paper, but he and his increasingly powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, are steadily treading down the path to authoritarianism. It's not so much that elections have been suspended – justifiable given the ongoing war. It's that Zelenskyy's most outspoken critics have been silenced or targeted for criminal prosecution, and other government institutions weakened in order to concentrate power in the president's office. These moves are only undermining Ukraine war efforts. This latest scandal will be seen both in Moscow and among the Maga base in Washington as a "welcome PR gift – reinforcing the Kremlin's narrative that Ukraine is irreparably corrupt and unworthy of Western support".

The West isn't blameless either, said Adéla Knapová in Novinky (Prague). For too long, Zelenskyy's allies have refused to ask "uncomfortable questions, let alone issue ultimatums" about his government's behaviour. "It's high time to do what a true friend should do", and tell the Ukrainian leader "we support democracy and civil society, not autocrats". After all, said Svitlana Morenets in The Spectator, isn't that what Ukraine's desperate fight against Putin is all about? "The war for Ukraine's future is being fought not just on the battlefield, but also within its democratic institutions." Last week that battle was almost lost.