WASHINGTON—He amassed one of the world’s great fortunes selling one of the few things Ukrainians all agree on — chocolate.

But now, candy mogul Petro Poroshenko, 48, appears destined for a new and decidedly bittersweet future as the overwhelming favourite to become crisis-racked Ukraine’s next president.

A succession of public opinion polls places this billionaire of many confections as the faraway front-runner in the country’s crucial May 25 vote to replace ousted and now fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych.

Poroshenko’s lead was underscored Tuesday by a Razumkov Centre survey showing it growing bigger still, with a third of Ukrainians now ready to give him their vote, compared to barely 10 per cent for his next nearest rival, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

If that lead holds — and more importantly, if Ukraine itself can hold together and conduct a successful election despite a deepening pro-Russian separatist insurgency tearing at its eastern provinces — Poroshenko will become Ukraine’s next great hope.

The day he wins, Poroshenko has pledged, he will divest himself of his chocolate, selling off the ubiquitous Roshen candy conglomerate. Those holdings, together with other manufacturing and media properties, make him the world’s 1,313th richest man, worth an estimated $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.

But the politics of Poroshenko, sometimes called Ukraine’s Willy Wonka, remain mercurial, given a history of playing alternating roles in both pro-western and pro-Russian governments since he was first elected to Parliament in 1998.

A co-founder and former ally of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, Poroshenko later fled to join the opposition, backing the 2005 Orange Revolution and eventually serving as foreign minister under former president Viktor Yushchenko.

And when the political needle swung back, vaulting hardliner Yanukovych to power in 2010, Poroshenko swung too, serving briefly as economics minister. When the protests against Yanukovych’s increasingly authoritarian rule erupted last winter in Kyiv, Poroshenko broke rank again, becoming the first Ukrainian business leader to side openly with the masses in the Maidan.

For some western leaders, the courtship has already begun. Poroshenko is scheduled to meet Wednesday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an apparent acknowledgment both of his rapid political ascent and of the sheer urgency of the Ukraine crisis.

When it began, Poroshenko’s election platform emphasized good governance, a central demand driving the Ukrainian protests. As he told the New York Times in March, “I have experience in how to build up a new investment climate. I know how to build zero tolerance to corruption. I know how to build a court system. I know how to create a positive, absolutely new page of Ukrainian history.”

But as pro-Russian violence intensifies, Poroshenko has since shifted to a hardline message of Ukrainian unity against territorial encroachment from the east. In the wake of Friday’s spree of violence in his native Odesa that left at least 40 dead, Poroshenko accused pro-Russian provocateurs of plotting to maximize casualties, writing on Facebook, “I tell everyone who wants to destroy our independence and freedom — get out!”

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Poroshenko’s latest shift appears not to have gone unnoticed in Moscow. Last month, Russian authorities sent dozens of armed police and plainclothes officials into a Roshen chocolate factory in the southern city of Lipetsk, padlocking the facility over a trademark dispute and throwing 2,000 people out of work.

Russian officials denied geopolitics played any role in the sanction against Roshen. Ukraine threatened reprisals, including the potential confiscation of Russian assets.

Through it all, Poroshenko has steadily gathered up support in Kyiv, including the backing of populist boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko, who ended his own quest for the presidency to back the chocolate baron.

But with fewer than three weeks to go, the deeper worry remains how elections will unfold in the context of worsening violence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking Tuesday as envoys to the 47-nation Council of Europe met in Vienna, cautioned that it would be “quite unusual” to hold a presidential election while the Ukrainian government was deploying its army against some of its own people.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague, meanwhile, flatly accused Russia of working to undermine the process, saying, “Russia seems intent on a course of preventing and disrupting those elections. That is wrong and I think where will be a very strong message from the great majority of countries here today that Ukrainian elections must be allowed to go ahead.”

Earlier Tuesday, French President François Hollande warned of the stakes of failure to hold the election May 25. “Otherwise there will be chaos and civil war,” Hollande told French channel BFMTV. “Vladimir Putin wishes today that this election does not take place.”

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