Populist democracy in Ukraine: Maidan, Zelensky, and the Big War

The talk conceptualises the democratisation process in contemporary Ukraine with Laclau’s rendering of populism (Laclau 2005). It is argued that the main vehicle of democratisation is popular mobilisation against post-Soviet patronalism (Hale 2015). Its main nodal points are the mass unrests of 2013-14, the 2019 presidential elections, and the Russian full-scale invasion of 2022. Whereas the idiosyncrasy of Ukrainian populism lies in its emancipatory, more inclusive and proactive character, dwelling on positive emotional mobilisation via the tropes of hope, future, and solidarity, its two duelling models are singled out. The “Maidan model” gravitates towards political activism and direct participation outside the state institutions, while the “audience democracy” model presumes direct representation (Urbinati 2019) and ocular accountability (Green 2010) hijacking the state structures. The fight for political representation of the populace between “activists” and “officials” was mitigated by the big war. It brought more cooperation between those constituencies, certain conflation of the heroic and technocratic ethos but also the enforcement of institutional capacity, traditionally weak in Ukrainian performative politics. The (ir)reversibility of those trends and future developments of the Ukrainian democratic model will be discussed.

Dr Valeria Korablyova is Assistant Professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies and the Leader of the Research Centre “Ukraine in a Changing Europe” at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University. Her expertise covers post-Soviet transformations in Ukraine and the region, with the research focus on mass protests, performative politics, and entangled imperial/colonial legacies. Currently, Dr Korablyova is a co-PI with Dr Louisa Martin-Chevalier in the Czech-French TANDEM project “A Subaltern That Sings: From Sound Resistance To Musical Diplomacy in Wartime Ukraine”. Her most recent publications include: “Fighting Russia’s ‘Dark Power’: The ‘Bright Power’ of Enacted Values” in Putin’s Europe. Russian Influence in European Democracy (European Liberal Forum, 2023); ‘“Russia VS. Ukraine: A Subaltern Empire Against The “Populism of Hope” in Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Studia Territorialia (# 2 2022); “Who Owns the Ukrainian State: The Elites – People Tensions After 1991” in Regions of Conflicts in Eastern Europe (Harrassowitz, 2023).