Ukraine according to Zelensky: Populism and National Identity in Presidential Addresses to Compatriots

Abstract

The article analyzes the interplay of populism and national identity in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Facebook communications, with particular attention to his direct addresses to compatriots. It examines how his representation of Ukraine and Ukrainians, on the one hand, weaves together different narratives of national identity and, on the other, asserts his own role as a strong leader working for the good of his people. Seeking to establish how his discourse changed in time of large-scale war, my analysis includes Zelensky’s messages to Ukrainians both before and after February 2022. At the same time, I compare his response to this grave threat to the nation with his tackling of another serious crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic two years earlier. My analysis demonstrates a peculiar mix of populism and inclusive nationalism.

Keywords:

• Populism
• national identity
• nationalism
• social media
• Ukraine

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Armed Forces of Ukraine under whose protection I was able to work on this article in Kyiv at the time of Russian aggression. My work has been facilitated by a non-residential fellowship awarded to me by the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. Thanks are also due to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the original submission.

Notes

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4 Paris Aslanidis, “Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a New Perspective,” Political Studies 64, no. 1 suppl (2016): 88–104, 96.

5 Ibid., 97.

6 Paris Aslanidis, “Measuring Populist Discourse with Semantic Text Analysis: An Application on Grassroots Populist Mobilization,” Quality & Quantity 52, no. 3 (2018): 1241–63; Aline Burni and Eduardo Tamaki, “Populist Communication During the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Case of Brazil’s President Bolsonaro,” Partecipazione e Conflitto 14, no. 1 (2021): 113–31.

7 Michael J. Lee, “The Populist Chameleon: The People’s Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 355–78; Jacopo Custodi, “Nationalism and Populism on the Left: The Case of Podemos,” Nations and Nationalism 27, no. 3 (2021): 705–20.

8 Laura Cervi, Fernando García, and Carles Marín-Lladó, “Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: Narrative, Fantasies, and Desires,” Social Sciences 10, no. 8 (2021): 294; Péter Visnovitz and Erin Kristin Jenne, “Populist Argumentation in Foreign Policy: The Case of Hungary under Viktor Orbán, 2010–2020,” Comparative European Politics 19, no. 6 (2021): 683–702.

9 Burni and Tamaki, “Populist Communication During the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

10 García Cervi and Marín-Lladó, “Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: Narrative, Fantasies, and Desires.”

11 Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism,” Javnost – The Public 24, no. 4 (2017): 301–19, 302.

12 Rogers Brubaker, “Populism and Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1 (2020): 44–66, 46.

13 De Cleen and Stavrakakis, “Distinctions and Articulations,” 313.

14 Rawi Abdelal, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Alastair Iain Johnston, and Rose McDermott, “Identity as a Variable,” Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 04 (2006): 695–711.

15 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 1995).

16 Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America,” Government and Opposition 48, no. 2 (2013): 147–74, 2.

17 Custodi, “Nationalism and Populism on the Left: The Case of Podemos.”

18 Benjamin Moffitt, “How to Perform Crisis: A Model for Understanding the Key Role of Crisis in Contemporary Populism,” Government and Opposition 50, no. 2 (2015): 189–217, 195.

19 Erin K. Jenne, “Varieties of Nationalism in the Age of Covid-19,” Nationalities Papers 50, no. 1 (2022): 26–44.

20 Burni and Tamaki, “Populist Communication During the Covid-19 Pandemic”; García Cervi and Marín-Lladó, “Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19.”

21 Stuart Hall, Selected Political Writings, The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays (Chadwell Heath: Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), 203.

22 Ibid., 203–4.

23 Ibid., 206.

24 Jessica Pisano, “How Zelensky Has Changed Ukraine,” Journal of Democracy 33, no. 3 (2022): 5–13, 7.

25 Natalya Ryabinska, “Politics as a Joke: The Case of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Comedy Show in Ukraine,” Problems of Post-Communism 69, no. 2 (2022): 179–91, 188.

26 Ibid., 189.

27 Kostiantyn Yanchenko, “Making Sense of Populist Hyperreality in the Post-Truth Age: Evidence from Volodymyr Zelensky’s Voters,” Mass Communication and Society, 26, no. 3 (2022): 509–531, 521.

28 Pisano, “How Zelensky Has Changed Ukraine,” 7.

29 Larysa Masenko, “Impers’ki stratehiï prynyzhennia ukraïntsiv. Pro shcho svidchyt’ smikhova kul’tura ‘Kvartalu-95’?” Radio Svoboda, 2021. https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/imperski-stratehiyi-ta-kvartal-95/31237319.html.

30 Konstantin Ash and Miroslav Shapovalov, “Populism for the Ambivalent: Anti-Polarization and Support for Ukraine’s Sluha Narodu Party,” Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no. 82 (2022): 823.

31 Olga Mashtaler, “The 2019 Presidential Election in Ukraine: Populism, the Influence of the Media, and the Victory of the Virtual Candidate,” In The Politics of Authenticity and Populist Discourses: Media and Education in Brazil, India and Ukraine (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 127–60.

32 Mashtaler, “The 2019 Presidential Election in Ukraine”; Olga Onuch, and Henry E. Hale, The Zelensky Effect. New Perspectives on Eastern Europe and Erasia (London: Hurst & Company, 2022).

33 Ash and Shapovalov, “Populism for the Ambivalent.”

34 Mashtaler, “The 2019 Presidential Election in Ukraine.”

35 Yanchenko, “Making Sense of Populist Hyperreality in the Post-Truth Age,” 14.

36 Oleksii Bratushchak, Proval u prokati. “Vidosiky” Zenens'koho vtrachaiut' miliony hliadachiv. May 13, 2020. https://imi.org.ua/monitorings/proval-v-prokati-vidosiky-zelenskogo-vtrachayut-miljony-glyadachiv-i33049?fbclid=IwAR1dyjfsNwS89cgH2FOAjRek6okCdLdgI9S3veuxMPdklgwIQt6dZPHo6aY (accessed October 2, 2022).

37 Ibid.

38 Stephen Shulman, “The Contours of Civic and Ethnic National Identification in Ukraine,” Europe-Asia Studies 56, no. 1 (2004): 35–56; Volodymyr Kulyk, “The Media, History and Identity: Competing Narratives of the Past in the Ukrainian Popular Press,” National Identities 13, no. 3 (2011): 287–303; Mykola Riabchuk, Dolannia ambivalentnosti. Dykhotomiia ukraïns’koï natsional’noï identychnosti – Istorychni prychyny ta politychni naslidky (Kyiv: IPiEND, 2019).

39 Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).

40 Kulyk, “The Media, History and Identity.”

41 Volodymyr Kulyk, “Is Ukraine a Multiethnic Country?” Slavic Review 81, no. 3 (2022): 299–323.

42 Onuch and Hale, The Zelensky Effect.

43 Sarah Birch, “Interpreting the Regional Effect in Ukrainian Politics,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 6 (2000): 1017–41; Volodymyr Kulyk, “Language Policies and Language Attitudes in Post-Orange Ukraine,” In Language Policy and Language Situation in Ukraine: Analysis and Recommendations (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 15–55; Volodymyr Kulyk, “Memory and Language: Different Dynamics in the Two Aspects of Identity Politics in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine,” Nationalities Papers 47, no. 6 (2019): 1030–47.

44 Onuch and Hale, The Zelensky Effect, 2; Jessica Pisano, “How Zelensky Has Changed Ukraine.”

45 Olga Mashtaler, “The 2019 Presidential Election in Ukraine”; Yanchenko, “Making Sense of Populist Hyperreality in the Post-Truth Age.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna and the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

Notes on contributors

Volodymyr Kulyk

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.