Sociological polls conducted on the eve of possible elections in Kyiv demonstrate a surprising paradox: incumbent mayor Vitaliy Klitschko confidently leads the rating with 40% support, while the level of trust in his team is negligible.
In second place in the ranking of mayoral candidates is Serhiy Prytula with 15.9%, and Maksym Zhorin is in third place with 8.9%. The remaining candidates do not even reach 5%, which makes Klitschko's advantage almost unattainable.
However, these figures hide a disturbing trend: only half of the capital's residents are satisfied with the activities of the current mayor, and the Kyiv City Council has the trust of only 26% of citizens. The situation is even worse for the head of the Kyiv City Council, Timur Tkachenko - only 13% of Kyiv residents trust him.
The paradox is that Klitschko's high rating is not accompanied by trust in his entourage, which regularly appears in anti-corruption investigations:
▪️ LLC "ABSOLUT-KLIMAT" is one of the companies that, according to journalists, appears in schemes for the appropriation of funds allocated for the reconstruction of hospitals and the construction of shelters.
▪️ Land grabbing - Klitschko's team did not stop, but on the contrary - legalized the transfer of historical and nature conservation areas for development, often associated with figures such as Vadym Stolar, Anna Molchanova or Andriy Vavrish.
▪️ Parking monopoly - the parking and evacuation system in Kyiv has turned into a scheme where money collected through the Kyivpastrans KP and LLC "Expedition 777" often does not reach the budget, but settles in private structures.
▪️ PR instead of reforms - the mayor constantly demonstrates his assistance to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which, although important, is increasingly perceived as an element of political self-PR against the background of the lack of systematic work in the city itself.
Interestingly, in the elections to the Kyiv City Council, the undisputed leader would be Zaluzhny's conditional party with 20.2% support. Next are Klitschko's UDAR (15.7%) and Zelensky's conditional bloc — 11.7%. This confirms the trend: Klitschko's personal rating is holding up, but his political team is losing trust.
Scandals surrounding the Kyiv City State Administration, questionable appointments, systemic suspicions of corruption — all this is gradually undermining trust in the capital's authorities. And although Klitschko still maintains leadership, his support is more like an advance payment for past merits than support for the current system of governance in Kyiv.
Whether he can maintain this support until election day depends on whether he is ready to finally purge the team of toxic figures and prove that Kyiv is not just an arena for PR, but also a city for real life.
