A comedian with no political experience won a landslide victory in Ukraine's presidential election Sunday, exit polls showed, dealing a stunning rebuke to the country's political establishment.
Volodymyr Zelensky, whose only previous political role was playing the president on television, trounced incumbent Petro Poroshenko by taking 73 per cent of the vote, according to exit polls conducted by several think tanks.
Poroshenko lost to the television star across all regions of the country, including in the west where he traditionally enjoyed strong support.
It was an extraordinary outcome to a campaign that started as a joke but struck a chord with voters frustrated by poverty, corruption and a five-year war that has claimed some 13,000 lives.
The 41-year-old star of TV series "Servant of the People" will now take the helm of a country of 45 million people beset by challenges and having run on the vaguest of political platforms.
After taking the most votes in last month's first-round election, Zelensky had enjoyed a strong lead over the 53-year-old Poroshenko going into Sunday's poll.
Voting earlier in the capital Kiev, the beaming frontrunner had said his campaign managed to bring Ukrainians together.
"We have united Ukraine," he said, wearing a casual suit with a t-shirt and accompanied by his wife. "Everything will be all right."
"People have gone mad," Viktoriya Olomutska, a 39-year-old Poroshenko supporter, said in Kiev. "Cinema and reality are two different things."
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