Kyiv, Ukraine – Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s fortunes have shifted since he was elected as an anticorruption outsider in 2019.In the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, his defiance and everyman image won him global acclaim and overwhelming support at home.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listBut that unity, exhausted by four years of full-scale war, has given way to a more complex mood.Now, while many Ukrainians still back him as an international figurehead, concerns about governance and corruption are reshaping his standing domestically. Then-Ukrainian presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskyy walks out of a voting booth at a polling station during the second round of a presidential election in Kyiv, Ukraine, April 21, 2019 [Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters]From Messiah to pariahIn 2019, when Zelenskyy ran for president, he was a well-known comic actor, best known for playing a schoolteacher who wakes up to find he has been elected head of state after a video of him ranting against corruption, secretly recorded by his pupils, goes viral.His campaign used much of the same anticorruption rhetoric as his on-screen character, positioning himself as an outsider to the entrenched oligarchic networks that dominated Ukrainian politics.This was something that appealed to voters disillusioned by the status quo, and he stormed to a landslide victory, winning 73 percent of the vote.After Zelenskyy came to power, the realities of governing began to erode his everyman image as he first dealt with an energy crisis and then, the impact of the global COVID pandemic. Advertisement In December 2021, two months before the war began, his popularity stood at just 31 percent, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.It is a cycle that Peter Dickinson, the British publisher of Business Ukraine magazine and editor of the Atlantic Coun …
