https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8491-9457
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ABSTRACT
In this study we used computer-assisted (Atlas.ti software) quantitative analysis of framing politics in a popular Ukrainian television comedy show Vechernii Kvartal (VKv) to evaluate whether and to what extent it used populist frames in 2019-2020, after its star and director Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidency with populist narratives. We found that VKv offered a consistently populist perspective for looking at politics. Its main element was anti-elitist humor targeting both old politicians and political newcomers, including those from Zelensky’s party Sluha Narodu. The only exception was Zelensky himself, who was portrayed via the characteristic of populism people-centrist template—as a simple man genuinely caring about the people. We found no exclusionist framing, which is typical, for example, for European right-wing populist rhetoric and which discursively excludes all who are not natives (minorities, migrants, asylum-seekers) from a country’s “pure and virtuous people.”
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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. See Freedom House (Citation2020) and Gherghina and Volintiru (Citation2021). By countries with transitional government, or hybrid regimes, Freedom House means countries defined as “electoral democracies where democratic institutions are fragile, and substantial challenges to the protection of political rights and civil liberties exist” (Freedom House Citation2020).
2. In the period under scrutiny in this study (November 2019–October 2020), Vechernii Kvartal was a Russian-language show. Kvartal announced that it would switch to Ukrainian on 16 July 2021, when the Law “On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language” came into force.
3. As this study was carried out before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it is worth noting that the portrayal of Ukrainian politics, society, and media in this section concerns the pre-war period.
4. Učeň (Citation2007), for example, mentioned the following examples of these parties in CEE: National Movement of Simeon II (NDSV) in Bulgaria, New Era (JL) in Latvia, Res Publica (RP) in Estonia, and the Party of Civic Understanding (SOP) in Slovakia.
5. Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency in 2010–2014 was characterized by a deterioration of media independence. Soon after he came to power, news coverage by nationwide TV channels became homogeneous, the number of newscasts and information programs decreased, and several TV channels stopped airing political talk shows, which only started to appear on Ukrainian TV after the Orange Revolution (Ryabinska Citation2017).
6. Political jokes were not the show’s only content. In the period researched here, sketches and monologues on politics accounted for around one-third of the show’s airtime (reaching up to 50% in some of the show’s episodes), while the rest of the show was devoted to non-political topics such as people’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, family, or relationships. However, almost all the episodes of the show included very specific and well-defined segments that were devoted to political humor, parody, and satire. This focus distinguished VKv from other popular humor TV shows, most importantly Kvartal’s rival for the audience’s attention, the Disel Show, which featured joking about politics only sporadically, as the show’s creators preferred to joke about social, not political matters (see the interview with Disel’s art director in Obozrevatel’ Citation2020).
7. There were some sketches where VKv presented fictional characters, but in the majority of political episodes it depicted real politicians. This is what distinguished Vechernii Kvartal from Servant of the People, the TV series where Zelensky played a schoolteacher who was elected president.
8. VKv was not a daily program: new episodes of the show were released on average once a month.
9. Final songs sometimes appeared in the middle or at the beginning of the show, but most usually, they ended the show.
10. Yevhen Koshovyi is one of the leading comedians in VKv. Before the Ukrainian local elections in October 2020, there were some rumors circulating in the Ukrainian media that Koshovyi would run for mayor of Kyiv.
11. The show also targeted Petro Poroshenko, but it presented him differently from Kolomoisky and Akhmetov – not as a powerful oligarch, but as a person controlled by them. Poroshenko was also laughed at as a politician defeated by Zelensky in the presidential elections, and – surprisingly – as a person addicted to alcohol. The latter will be discussed below in the section on “Personal-traits framing instead of a focus on policy issues”
12. The event was covered in the international press, among others, in The Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-central-banker-house-fire-arson-kyiv-valeria-gontareva-a9108876.html).
13. Volodymyr Zelensky ended his entertainment career after he won the presidential election on 21 April 2019. After this, in all the sketches where President Zelensky appeared as a character, he was impersonated by another actor. In the fragments of VKv’s sketches quoted in the Results section, by “Zelensky” it is understood that what we mean is “an actor impersonating Zelensky”
14. In the Russian language, the word sazhat’ can mean “to plant” or “to put in jail” The slogan hence was built around the wordplay: it could mean as “When spring comes, we will plant,” or “When spring comes, we will imprison.”
15. After winning the 2019 parliamentary election, Sluha Narodu received 254 out of 450 seats, which gave it an opportunity to create a one-party coalition, commonly referred to as a “mono-majority”