Servant of the People (Ukrainian: Слуга народу, romanized: Sluha narodu, pronounced [sɫʊˈɦa nɐˈrɔdʊ]) is a liberal, centrist, pro-European political party in Ukraine.
[14] The current president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who starred in Servant of the People) is a member of the party.
[11][13] At the time Kvartal 95 created the party, they claimed it was important to do so to prevent others from stealing the name of the eponymous series for "cynical political purposes".
[15] In December 2017, 4% of Ukrainians polled by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Center declared their readiness to vote for a party named "Servant of the People" in parliamentary elections, and in May 2018 this number had grown to 5% (the minimum necessary to pass Ukraine's election threshold).
[16] Almost all of the 2018 funds were received on the eve of Zelenskyy's 2019 New Year's speech in which he announced his candidacy in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election.
[20] Zelenskyy stated that the party would enter a coalition government with neither the Petro Poroshenko Bloc nor Opposition Platform — For Life.
[23] On 2 June 2019, the registration of potential candidates to run for the party in majority constituencies during the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election ended.
[26] It took place in Kyiv's Hryshko National Botanical Garden and was attended by President Zelenskyy and party leader Razumkov, among others.
[27] Well-known names in the nationwide party list were: Olympic athletes Olha Saladukha, Vadym Gutzeit and Zhan Beleniuk and long-term CEO of 1+1 Media Group Oleksandr Tkachenko.
[27] Three days later Gutzeit and two other candidates had withdrawn themselves from the election, whilst a fourth was excluded from the list "after additional checks".
[28][29] During the post-primaries, press and activists highlighted the most controversial representatives of the party, such as Oleksandr Dubinsky and Max Buzhanskiy.
[33] In the (21 July) 2019 parliamentary election, the top ten party candidates[34] were Dmytro Razumkov, Ruslan Stefanchuk, Iryna Venediktova, Davyd Arakhamia, Halyna Yanchenko, Mykhailo Fedorov, Oleksandr Kornienko, Anastasia Krasnosilska, Oleksandr Tkachenko and Zhan Beleniuk.
[51] The party did not nominate a candidate for the October 2021 snap mayoral election in Kharkiv (the second-largest city of Ukraine[52]).
[56]) [8] Early November 2024 the party had a faction of 233 people's deputies left of the 254 seats that they had won in the 2019 parliamentary election.
[8] Chesno found that the unity in voting among the party MP's began to decline rapidly after the March 2020 installation of the Shmyhal Government.
[65] On 23 May 2019, Ruslan Stefanchuk, Zelenskyy's representative in the Verkhovna Rada, announced that the party had chosen libertarianism as its core ideology.
[66] On 3 June 2019, however, the head of the party's election office Oleksandr Kornienko claimed, "go 20km or 100km out of Kyiv, and nobody will understand the issue of ideology there, who is right, left or centre here.
[71][74] The party also claimed that its key goal is to achieve a higher than average European income and quality of life for Ukrainians.