Elections in Ukraine: President's Office admits discussions, but without 'great hysteria'
The President's Office is talking about possible future elections, but the authorities have not yet developed specific scenarios for their holding, hromadske has learned.
Our source in the President's Office said that, despite the talk about the elections, it cannot be said "that the atmosphere of Bankova is completely absorbed by the election process."
According to him, among those who are "trying to scale and model future election races" is the ex-deputy chairman of the President’s Office, and now the deputy prime minister for reconstruction, the minister of community and territorial development Oleksiy Kuleba, as well as Viktor Mykyta, who used to be the Zakarpattia regional governor, and now replaced Kuleba in the Office.
In addition to them, the head of the Servant of the People faction, David Arakhamia, who "draws a strategy for changing the electoral system" in order to replace it with a majoritarian one, talks about the elections.
"But in the end, I will emphasize that there is no great hysteria around the elections yet," said a hromadske source in the President’s Office.
Arakhamia himself, in a comment to hromadske, called the talks about the elections, which are allegedly being held in power, "a complete fake and assured that, "except for everyday ‘meetings over a bottle of coffee’, there is nothing."
The head of the Servant of the People party, Olena Shuliak, said the same: according to her, elections are impossible in the conditions of a full-scale war, and talks about it allegedly only destabilize the situation in the country.
At the end of September, The Economist, without citing sources, wrote that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, seems to be considering the possibility of holding presidential elections in the next year, 2025, against the background of a drop in his popularity. The head of state allegedly wants to strengthen his power with the help of elections.
Already at the beginning of November, The Economist wrote (also without indicating specific sources) that the earliest date of elections being discussed in Ukraine is May 25, 2025.
Journalists cited representatives of "one likely competitor of Volodymyr Zelenskyy" in the potential presidential election, who said that Ukraine needs elections, but they are wary of making a public statement about it, fearing a backlash from the Office of the President.