93% of the embattled Ukrainian public believe that their country will defeat Russia’s military invasion. 72% of polled Americans claimed to have more confidence in the country’s sixth President Volodymyr Zelenskyy than their own President Biden. And the man is said to have survived more than a dozen paramilitary assassination attempts already.
All this national and global faith, for the guy that voiced the Ukrainian dub of Paddington?
To understand just how Zelenskyy is so beloved and trusted in his country, you could do worse than watching the bizarre political comedy Servant of The People, now streaming its entire first season on SBS On Demand.
It’s just wild to look back at the wartime leader’s entertainment career, especially in how this goofy series went from fiction to fact pretty quickly. After three years of the series’ success, members of the then-comedian’s production company established a political party also called Servant of the People in March 2018: by October 2018, Zelenskyy was a frontrunner in opinion polls, and was ultimately elected President in April 2019 with a landslide 73% victory to opponent Poroshenko’s 25%.
The unassuming high school teacher Zelenskyy plays in the show was apparently highly electable, as seen in the series’ pilot. After ranting against government corruption to his students, a video of Zelenskyy’s character Vasiliy goes viral, and suddenly gets him the country’s top job.
As in real life, Zelenskyy’s put-upon President runs on a platform of anti-establishment sentiment, proportionally representative voting, and reducing oligarch’s influence on national politics. It’s all sprinkled with absurd humour throughout, though, making it a surreal watch now that the actor is at the centre of geopolitical horror.
You might watch Servant of the People and understand how the likeable upstart was quickly seen as a legitimate choice for leadership: or you might just find it too sad and bizarre to enjoy the gentle fictional adventures of a man who was recently quoted as saying: “We will find every scum who was shelling our cities, our people, who was shooting the missiles, who was giving orders. You will not have a quiet place on this earth—except for a grave.”
