This graphic shows that Zelenskiy's margin of victory was higher than in any other previous Ukrainian presidential election:
Pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, in this case Crimea de facto chief Aksenov, continue to stress how the election is a rejection of the what replaced Yanukovych:
The graphic of voting totals throughout Ukraine shows how dominant he was (Poroshenko only doing well in the far west):
https://elections.dekoder.org/ukraine/en
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has congratulated Zelenskiy on his victory:
Yulia Tymoshenko said Zelenskiy's victory is a "chance for Ukraine":
Poroshenko actually won the vote among Ukrainians living abroad, with about 54 percent to 45 percent over Zelenskiy:
'An Electoral Maidan': Hope And Change, Ukrainian-Style, Vaults Zelenskiy Into Presidency
By Carl Schreck
In the end, it was a demand for radical change and broad disappointment with the incumbent that vaulted a comedian who played Ukraine’s president on television into the real thing.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy rode these sentiments, political analysts and sociologists say, to what was shaping up to be an unprecedented landslide victory over President Petro Poroshenko in the country’s April 21 runoff vote.
“The absolute majority of Ukrainians again, just as they did five years ago, want radical political change. In that sense, this was a kind of Maidan -- but an electoral one,” Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told RFE/RL, referring to the central Kyiv square at the heart of the 2013-14 protests that helped oust Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and paved the way for Poroshenko’s election.
Exit polls and early ballot counts overnight gave Zelenskiy, a 41-year-old political novice, more than 70 percent of the vote, putting him on course for the largest margin of victory in a presidential poll in the history of modern Ukraine.
"These are very atypical data. As a rule, our elections were very competitive and such a result, such a margin, has never been seen,” sociologist Natalya Kharchenko told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA, following the release of the first exit polls.
Poroshenko, a two-time cabinet minister and 53-year-old confectionery tycoon seen as a compromise candidate in 2014, campaigned this time on his record as a wartime leader during the five-year conflict with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000.
With Poroshenko’s campaign slogan -- “Army! Language! Faith!” -- he also highlighted Ukrainian worshipers' newfound independence from the Russian Orthodox Church and portrayed himself as a defender of the Ukrainian language.
But those issues proved to be less pressing for the Ukrainian electorate than economic concerns and a demand for greater efforts to combat endemic corruption, according to Kharchenko and Olha Onuch, an associate professor of politics at the University of Manchester who researches Ukraine.
“The majority of Ukrainians do not particularly focus on language laws or focus on the religious aspect,” Onuch told RFE/RL. “This is not really speaking to them. It was bread-and-butter issues, it was survival, basic daily needs that aren’t being met, the everyday corruption that they face in almost every single aspect of life.”
‘Clear Instance Of Punishment’
Opinion polls had indicated that Zelenskiy would defeat Poroshenko soundly in the runoff, so the comedian's victory wasn’t exactly a surprise to anyone paying attention.
After winning the presidency in May 2014 with 54 percent of the vote, Poroshenko’s approval ratings with the public fell dramatically and stayed there, making his chances of defeating Zelenskiy slim even if he had run his campaign differently, said Fesenko, director of the Kyiv-based Penta Center for Political Studies.
One survey last month showed that nearly half of voters would not vote for Poroshenko under any circumstances.
“It’s extremely difficult, and probably impossible, to overcome those voter attitudes,” Fesenko told RFE/RL.
Early exit-poll data indicated that Zelenskiy, a Russian-speaker who faced criticism for not speaking Ukrainian frequently enough during the campaign, garnered more support than Poroshenko not only in Ukraine’s predominantly Russian-speaking southeast, but throughout the country.
“It’s the first such election that featured not only the largest margin of victory between the two candidates, but also no regional divergence,” Kharchenko told Current Time.
“People are placing their hopes in him almost everywhere. They support him and are waiting for change,” she added.
'Lots Of Hopes'
While embracing his status as a political outsider, Zelenskiy, who said Poroshenko had congratulated him on his victory and offered his help, ran a campaign that was thin on policy specifics. Fesenko said Zelenskiy will face expectations from the electorate to introduce major changes almost immediately after taking office.
“Ukrainian voters...get disappointed quickly. It’s happened with every president from [Leonid] Kravchuk to Poroshenko. Vladimir Zelenskiy faces that risk as well,” Fesenko said.
Only one Ukrainian president since independence, Leonid Kuchma in 1999, has won reelection.
Ahead of parliamentary elections later this year, Zelenskiy “needs to show in the coming months that he truly wants radical changes,” Fesenko said.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy, head of the parliamentary Self-Reliance party, told Current Time that Zelenskiy “embodies of lot of hopes” among the Ukrainian people, who will “expect a miracle” from him “as early as tomorrow.”
Sadoviy advised Zelenskiy to call early parliamentary elections -- something he had pledged to do should he defeat Poroshenko as part of a planned “renewal” of Ukraine’s governing class.
Poroshenko’s party, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, currently holds the most seats in the Ukrainian parliament, and the outgoing president pledged in his concession speech on April 21 that he intended to stay in politics to “ensure that Ukraine does not change its course" toward integration with the European Union and NATO.
Precisely what his future role in Ukrainian politics might be remains uncertain. But Onuch of the University of Manchester said that the message voters sent on April 21 was crystal clear.
“For the Ukrainian electorate, this is a clear instance of punishment,” she said.
Reality Show: Zelenskiy's Big Day In Six Moments
By Christopher Miller
KYIV -- Fact has followed fiction.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comic actor who plays a common man accidentally catapulted into an exasperated Ukraine's presidency on TV, has won big in the country's real presidential election.
Almost as remarkably, he appears to be doing it in runaway fashion in a process that both he and defeated incumbent Petro Poroshenko cited after the vote as a model for all post-Soviet states.
Here are six enduring moments from a historic, if surreal, day in Ukrainian politics.
Pumped Up With Eminem
After he had cast his ballot -- and having acknowledged that he got "little" sleep -- Zelenskiy hinted that he had awakened on election day with some nerves. His wife, Yelena, had tried to calm and energize him with some music, he said.
Her choice of artists? Eminem.
We don't know if Zelenskiy "lost himself" or "sang for the moment," as he couldn't recall the American rapper's exact song. Could have been Lucky You.
But he demonstrated just how he bobbed his head to it.
Busted By The Cops
With scores of cameras rolling inside a packed polling station at Kyiv's Maritime Academy, Zelenskiy had cast a vote for himself. Then he flashed it to reporters before dropping it into the ballot box.
While the cameras loved it, the police did not. It apparently broke Ukrainian legislation aimed at preventing campaigning by candidates on election day.
Shortly thereafter, officers arrived at Zelenskiy's office to fine him less than $30 for the display.
One of the officers who wrote up the citation, Viktor Stolyar, told Current Time afterward that police had "consulted about it and decided to draw up an administrative protocol" since that would be "more effective than a criminal case that couldn't be completed."
For his part, Zelenskiy said it seemed like a fair cop: "OK, I broke the law. The law is the law."
A 'Pig In A Poke' Again
Meanwhile, a topless activist from the homegrown protest collective Femen challenged the notion that a vote for the TV president was a step in the right direction for Ukraine.
"We don't know who will come with Zelenskiy; he's a cat in a bag," she said outside the polling station where Zelenskiy cast his ballot in Kyiv, invoking the Slavic equivalent of a pig in a poke.
It was a direct quote from Poroshenko at the raucous stadium meeting on April 19 that was as close as the two runoff candidates came to a presidential debate, with the incumbent accusing the challenger of ducking policy questions and providing little of substance that he or voters could latch onto, saying he was a "cat in a bag." (Zelenskiy countered by calling Poroshenko a "wolf in sheep's clothing.")
"It can turn out to be a funny mistake -- funny and fatal," the protester, who identified herself as Julia, told reporters on April 21, with a Zelenskiy victory seemingly assured.
"Right now, all Ukrainians' hopes are in his hands.... I'm asking Zelenskiy and all politicians, including old ones, to stop raping our country. Enough of that; people have stopped hoping."
Femen's website added that Ukraine had been "raped by a gang of crooks" and suggested "a pig in a poke is the logical fruit of such love."
Hard To Swallow
Novaya Vremya reported that in Zelenskiy's hometown, Kriviy Rih, a woman "in a state of intoxication ate part of a ballot."
The paper quoted local election commission member Inna Ivanchenko, who posted on Facebook evidence of the defiled ballot, with an "X" mark next to Zelenskiy's name and a line drawn through Poroshenko's.
"They managed to snatch a piece," Novaya Vremya quoted Ivanchenko as saying.
It was one of the seemingly lighter moments caught on video for the Ukrainian Election Commission's Facebook page.
But it was also part of what the Electoral Commission warned was an election-day spoiler for some voters, with reports that social networks were disseminating misleading information about how to fill out ballots. Not only should the preferred candidate be marked, the bum advice went, but also the other candidate's name should be crossed out. That misinformation, the commission warned, was getting thousands of views and shares and would spoil the ballots in question.
5... 4... 3... 2... President-Elect Of Ukraine
Finally, as election night fell, with the flair of -- well, of a 41-year-old actor/entertainer, Zelenskiy strode into the spotlight at his campaign headquarters with a wide smile and to the theme song of his Servant Of The People sitcom. He took the stage about a minute before polling stations closed and the embargo was lifted on exit polls that predicting his landslide win.
Then he counted down from five before numbers flashed across the huge video screen showing him leading all the exit polls with at least around 73 percent of the vote to Poroshenko's 25 or so.
"Thank you," he shouted into a microphone as the crowd cheered and confetti rained down.
The Result In Two Pics
Within minutes of Zelenskiy's triumphant countdown, across town, Poroshenko would take the stage in a considerably less festive appearance to concede the election.
But no words could capture the two sides' electoral fates better than the images that were starting to come out of Kyiv.
With contributions by Andy Heil
Poroshenko: 'I Am Staying In Politics, I Will Fight For Ukraine'
In his concession speech following the April 21 presidential runoff vote against Volodymyr Zelenskiy, incumbent Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko vowed to remain in politics. Speaking on April 21 in Kyiv, he called on the international community "to help Ukraine secure its recent achievements and the strategic course of the nation for integration into the European Union and NATO."