The 41 year-old TV comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who won Ukraine’s elections last month, was sworn in as president on Monday and immediately said he was dissolving the country’s parliament to hold early elections.
At the inauguration ceremony held in the parliament’s building in Kiev, Jewish Zelenskiy pledged to seek an end to the war with Russia in Ukraine’s east and told lawmakers he wanted them to pass legislation to root out corruption.
Zelenskiy won a landslide election in late April with 73 per cent of the vote, defeating the incumbent President Petro Poroshenko as he rode a wave of popular dissatisfaction with Ukraine’s political class and weariness over five years of war.
He ran on a platform promising to shake up Ukraine’s politics, which most Ukrainians consider deeply corrupt and self-serving.
His victory made international headlines, in part because the popular entertainer has no previous political and stars in a television show in which he plays a man who unexpectedly becomes president.
Monday’s ceremony was markedly different from past inaugurations in Ukraine and the usual forbidding grandiosity that marks such occasions in former Soviet countries. Zelenskiy dropped the traditional motorcade that shuts down traffic, instead walking through a park past a large crowd. Beaming, he stopped and high-fived supporters, even at one point jumping up to kiss a man on the top of his head.
In his speech in front of MPs, officials and foreign dignitaries, Zelenskiy said his election showed people were tired of an exploitative political class and told lawmakers who weren’t ready to change things they should resign.
“I don’t understand our government, which only throws up its hands and tells me that we can’t do anything. That’s not true — you can, you can take some paper, take a pen and free up your places for those who will think about the next generation and not about the next elections,” he told lawmakers before announcing he was dissolving parliament.
ABC News
