Some question whether rival is also shackled by old system that reasserted itself despite hopes of Maidan revolution

When Petro Poroshenko won Ukraine’s presidential election five years ago, it was with the campaign slogan: “Live in a new way!”

Ukrainians voted for him in the hope he would make real the hopes and desires of all those who had poured into the streets for the Maidan revolution and forced the country’s corrupt kleptocratic president Viktor Yanukovych to flee.

As with most revolutions, it was always going to be hard to live up to those heady expectations, particularly in Ukraine, where a group of powerful businessmen were long used to having a major stake in politics, and for Poroshenko, who had been one of those oligarchs.

Maidan was a genuine outpouring of popular fury, and briefly broke all the rules of the Ukrainian game, in which political parties, values and leaders were often little more than cynical vehicles for different businessmen to advance their financial interests. It was also called the revolution of dignity, and there was a demand for a new kind of politics. But the old system soon reasserted itself.

“Poroshenko’s freedom has been limited by his alliances and his political debts,” said a western diplomat based in Kyiv, portraying the incumbent president as both part of the old system of influence, and constrained every time he tried to wriggle free from its confines.

While there have been a number of important reforms in recent years, and a newly energised civil society and media landscape has emerged, in many areas politics under Poroshenko still works in the old way: the judiciary remains alarmingly corrupt and the oligarchs still wield influence.

After five years, with few Ukrainians feeling like they live in the new way they were promised, Poroshenko seems almost certain to lose Sunday’s presidential election. Other familiar political faces were also rejected during the first round of voting.

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Instead, the country appears poised to vote into office a complete political novice, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, known for playing a fictional accidental president in a long-running television series. With a seemingly unassailable lead in most polls, it will take a dramatic last-minute turnaround to stop the actor and comedian winning.

Zelenskiy has run a slick and modern campaign, but it has been marked by a lack of specifics; instead, he has provided a blank screen on to which people can project their disappointments with the incumbent. “The election is a referendum on Poroshenko,” said Balázs Jarábik, an analyst from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank.

“Reality is not really as we hoped it would be five years ago,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, a journalist who became an MP with Poroshenko’s bloc after Maidan, but is now advising the Zelenskiy camp.

In a very Ukrainian twist, there are questions over whether Zelenskiy is really so removed from the traditional political players. Journalists have discovered flight records suggesting he made frequent trips to Tel-Aviv and Geneva, the twin bases of exiled oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy, and a number of Zelenskiy’s inner circle are also linked to the businessman, who owns the channel where Zelenskiy’s television programmes appear.

The election thus ends up looking quintessentially Ukrainian: a president who promised he would take on the oligarchs but is actually an oligarch himself, against an actor known for playing a fictional president who takes on the oligarchs, but who is in fact controlled by an oligarch.

The more optimistic observers say the very fact that elections have been more or less fair and competitive is a positive sign, and that Poroshenko managed limited but important reforms that have moved the country in the right direction, even as Ukraine came under attack from Russia over the past five years.

They add that whatever Zelenskiy’s previous links to Kolomoyskiy, he will acquire sweeping powers as president that could enable him to escape from the influence of his associate. Perhaps, he could really be the deus ex machina the country needs to break free once and for all from the web of oligarchy.

The overwhelming feeling in Kyiv as the election campaign draws to a close, however, is one of uncertainty. Who is Zelenskiy the politician? How similar is he to his television character? How he will govern if he does win? Nobody really has any idea.

“History is still being written here,” said Oleksiy Ryabchyn, one of the new cohort of reform-minded MPs who entered parliament after Maidan. “I hope that in the history books it will be written that after the revolution of dignity it was hard, but the country slowly reformed and changed for the better. But it’s possible there will be a different story.”