Ein man drives to the office. The sun is shining, a happy song is singing in his head, the people he is cycling past are smiling after him. It’s almost unbearable to watch. Because the man is Volodymyr Zelenskyj.
The houses he passes may already be rubble, the people on the streets may be dead. And Zelenskyy doesn’t have to go up against oligarch-funded MPs and lame bureaucrats, but rather an army that doesn’t play good jokes can be defeated and can escalate further at any time, just look at the photos of Mariupol.
He is still at his post. When Joe Biden went to get him out, he let it be known he didn’t need a ride, he needed ammo. He is, he decided years ago, a servant of the people.
That’s the name of the television series in which Zelenskyj played a history teacher who is elected president without any political experience. He played it so well that the Ukrainians elected him, an actor with no political experience, as their president.
That was in 2019, and after that it continued roughly as in the satire with which Zelenskyj had attacked reality: tough bickering in parliament, oligarchs who showed not the slightest willingness to be put in the curb, encroaching interventions from the Abroad, among other things by Donald Trump, who wanted to make Selenskyj a tool in his election campaign against Joe Biden, reforms that did not get off the ground.
But unlike his shrewd history teacher Vasily Petrovych Holoborodko, the man who now actually had to be president could no longer think with sleepwalking certainty of how he was supposed to cope with all of this. On the one hand, this was because reality is tougher than screenplays. And on the other hand, unfortunately, she doesn’t capitulate when you shoot jokes at her.
Those in “Servants of the People” were exceptionally hot, which you can see in the media library of the TV channel “Arte”, which has all 23 episodes of the first season. Each of them is an attack on a completely dysfunctional state: parliamentarians who have nothing else in mind than their enrichment; ministers inventing a threatening meteorite impact to prevent mass protests; banks that can no longer pay out; special budgets for road construction, which vanish in the course of appeals; a populace that condemns the corruption of those in power, but is willing to be corrupted itself when the opportunity arises.
And a normal guy trying to tidy up the mess he’s supposed to manage. Not for a single second does Holoborodko have the time to develop something promising for the future, in a never-ending marathon he is only busy patching up leaks. Zelenskyj’s portrayal of Ukraine’s problems, as grotesque and exaggerated as it seems, must have been very realistic – otherwise he would not have been elected with 73 percent.
Zelenskyj is a civilian through and through
In the present, however, it all seems laughably idyllic. With every gag, one’s mood vanishes again, because one cannot deny that Zelenskyj and Ukraine are now confronted with other horrors than sinister billionaires and IMF delegations demanding loan installments. Now it’s supersonic missiles, the destruction of cities, the bombing of maternity hospitals, theaters, apartment buildings. Comedy doesn’t do anything against it, it can’t even open up an escape corridor.
Still, “Servant of the People” is worth watching right now. Because the series shows you what kind of person Zelenskyj is – a civilian through and through. Someone who doesn’t care about fame, glory, intimidation, dominance.
People should only be able to live well and peacefully
His history teacher, who has fallen into the sphere of power, wants nothing more than that people can live well and peacefully: that the roads they drive have no potholes, that savings accounts are safe, that state money is not poured into the grotesque residences of the people Powerful flows or wages are paid. It goes without saying that this is naïve idealism, which always fails because of the factual. But, according to Zelenskyj’s series, one should not trust anyone who has thrown the idealism of public spirit overboard.
His greatest and almost his only power in Servant of the People is speech. He was only elected to office because one day at school he let himself be carried away into a rant (“We have had the choice between plague and cholera, and have had for 25 years! (…) Then these pigs will come to power and take everything under their nails!”), which one of his students recorded with his cell phone and posted on YouTube.
And when he delivers his maiden telegraph address to MPs, he puts aside the phrases written for him by his staff to say without diplomatic considerations what needs to be said: “You are the servants of the people. Have you ever seen servants live better than their master? Instead of serving your people, serve the oligarchs. Don’t you want to do anything good for the people? Do you really think your credit cards will be accepted while you’re underground?”
In his speeches, he pulls out all the stops, quick-witted counterattacks, politically incorrect jokes, catchy comparisons, clear language – everything that politicians have usually given up on as soon as they are in office. In any case, you will never see Olaf Scholz speak like this in the Bundestag again.
The comedian-turned-politician has meanwhile found his way back to reality to the rhetorical peak form of his series. There isn’t a day on which Zelenskyj doesn’t give impressive speeches from the war zone.
Putin is a crazy poison dwarf
He speaks to the Ukrainians, to the Russians, to the parliaments of the world – in England with Churchill allusions, in France he reminds of the values of liberté, egalité and fraternité, in the German Bundestag of Ronald Reagan’s speech in Berlin that one must tear down the wall. And with each of his appearances, it becomes clearer what kind of person Vladimir Putin is: a crazy poisonous dwarf full of conspiracy theories who only spouts crazy drivel instead of sensible sentences.
What’s also impressive about Servant of the People is that the Russians aren’t enemies in it, not even a little bit. When the series came on Ukrainian television in 2015, Crimea had already been annexed and a war had broken out in Donbass, which has cost many thousands of lives to this day and has been constantly fueled by Putin.
In Selenskyj’s series you don’t notice anything of that. The threats to the community all come from within, and the president played by Zelenskyj makes no worse jokes about the man, who was already annoyed by Ukraine’s independence at the time, than about Indian negotiators or Angela Merkel. Zelenskyj’s patriotism does not rise above other nations, but lives from the fact that he has more confidence in his country and the people who live in it than they do in themselves.
It was therefore not particularly surprising that Petro Poroshenko, his predecessor as president, dismissed him during the 2019 election campaign as a dreamer whom Putin and the Russians would have an easy time with. And that Selenskyj was repeatedly accused of lacking patriotism – also because the series was shot in Russian and was only subsequently translated into Ukrainian.
How wrong Poroshenko and Putin have been can be admired every day since February 24. Zelenskyj is still standing. Can’t be beaten. Counters the reality that wants to wipe out him and his people with speech and wit, still not tossing about patriotic gibberish and even speaks directly to his enemies.
It may be that he will go under in the end – one does not want to imagine it, but it is difficult to imagine it otherwise. But until then, he doesn’t want to be a servant who lives better than his master. So he keeps going.