Anton Yatsenko's life had hit a rough patch. It turned out, as the saying goes, no matter how much you feed a wolf (read: the "welcomed" 200th District), it will still turn out to be an ungrateful pig.
What does Anton want more than a palazzo in Venice? A seat in District 200, a seat he's invested in with much of his hard-earned wealth.
And yet, it seemed, Anton was doing everything right. He repaired roads, X-rayed voters' bodies, installed new traffic lights at rural intersections, and even patched up cracks in leaky school roofs. Anton was "warming up" the district as best he could.
But will he become a people's deputy on October 26?
There's a problem: Anton isn't trendy these days. Tulubob's favorite politician, a Hermes-like figure who grins and looks down on mortals from the heights of political Olympus, has lately been either smearing flour on his head, getting a dressing-down from the ever-intelligent Chernomaz, or shouting "Shame!" over something very patriotic through heavy fire.
And the saddest part of this story for Anton: power in the areas he'd taken over had changed. True, if a donkey laden with gold can take any fortress, then the business-minded and preoccupied Anton can even more so.
But something has subtly changed. It's not even Yatsenko's odious party affiliation. So what, a member of the Party of Regions... The day before yesterday he was in Batkivshchyna, yesterday he was in the Party of Regions, today he's in the "For Everything Good, Against Everything Bad" party. It's just that society's appetite for a rich, gold-spending son of Papa Carlo is no longer what it used to be.
This is what happens in a country in the midst of a historical upheaval. A demand arises for (ugh, it's embarrassing even to utter such nonsense out loud) some semblance of morality in politics.
Anton may be a paragon of anything—dexterity, omnivorousness, the ability to squeeze through any crack without gel—but accusing him of being conscientious and principled is simply out of the question. You've picked the wrong guy!
In the grand scheme of things, the question of whether Yatsenko will win a second term in parliament from the Uman district is far from idle. If the warmed-up voters vote again for Yatsenko, Zubik, and Poplavsky, then Maidan, the annexation of Crimea, and the war with Russia in the east are merely a chain of events, followed by the banal replacement of the "Donetsk" regime with, say, "Vinnytsia" or "Dnipropetrovsk" ones.
If the changes in the country are not cosmetic, then all these guys from the elite deputy club "200 hryvnia per snout per vote" should fly over their warm districts like plywood over Baden-Baden.
So let's sincerely wish ourselves to hear our favorite childhood song about little Anton Vladimirovich performed by Mikhail Poplavsky. Vladimir Zubik, Gennady Bobov and Valentin Nechiporenko are in the corps de ballet.
Alexander Arabach, Province
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