If It's Good Enough for Churchill...

Why Ukraine is right to postpone elections - and why Trump's Kremlin-friendly 'dictator' smear should be ignored.

As the head of a feisty pro-democracy campaign organisation, it’s not often you’ll hear me advocating against the holding of elections. But today, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I’ll start with a remarkable fact: Between 1940 and 1944, our Parliament voted five times to postpone scheduled general elections and extend its own mandate. Hansard - the meticulous record of parliamentary debate - shows almost no discussion of these decisions. There was, according to records, only one occasion during the entire war when Churchill was even asked about it. The need to postpone elections during an existential conflict was so blindingly obvious that Parliament barely saw fit to discuss it.

So why is Volodymyr Zelenskyy being called a dictator for making the same choice?

The parallels between wartime Britain and today’s Ukraine are striking. Both faced invasion by a hostile power bent on conquest. Both saw mass displacement of their populations. Both mobilised their citizens for total war. And both recognised that the circus of electoral politics - the rallies, the campaigns, the partisan conflict - was incompatible with the need to focus on national survival.

Churchill’s government extended Parliament’s life before the Blitz even began, clearly understanding that elections and war of any intensity just don’t mix. Ukraine’s current situation is, I would argue, even more severe than the one Churchill faced. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced - either internally or as refugees abroad. A million citizens serve in the armed forces, many literally in the trenches on the front line. Twenty per cent of the country remains under Russian occupation. Daily missile and drone strikes make large gatherings - the lifeblood of democratic campaigning - a potential death trap.

It’s important to know that Ukraine’s constitution sensibly and explicitly prohibits elections under martial law. This isn’t some authoritarian sleight of hand; it reflects the considered judgment, shared across democratic nations, that elections held under such constraints cannot be free or fair. The Venice Commission - Europe’s foremost authority on constitutional standards - is unequivocal: elections require a peaceful political atmosphere, full enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, and complete guarantee of public order and security.

None of these conditions exist in Ukraine today. And here’s the crucial point behind my uncharacteristic decision to advocate against an election: a rushed, flawed wartime election wouldn’t serve Ukrainian democracy. It would discredit it.

Consider what such an election would look like. Only 75 per cent of polling stations are currently operational. Voter registers, frozen since 2022, are hopelessly outdated. Of the seven million refugees abroad, only one in sixteen is registered with a Ukrainian consulate - meaning the vast majority couldn’t vote even if mechanisms existed. How would candidates campaign under active bombardment? How would soldiers cast ballots from their trenches? How would international observers monitor polling stations that might be struck by Russian missiles at any moment?

An election conducted under these conditions would fail every international standard. It would disenfranchise millions. And Putin would reject its outcome anyway - while gleefully cataloguing every inevitable procedural failure to attack Ukraine’s democratic credentials internationally. The demand for wartime elections in Ukraine is not a defence of democracy; it is a trap designed to undermine it.

Which brings us to Vladimir Putin’s catch-22. The Kremlin insists Zelenskyy is ‘illegitimate’ because his term has technically expired and demands elections as a precondition for negotiations (even though Ukraine’s constitutional prohibition on holding elections during periods of martial law immediately destroys the allegation). But Ukrainian law dictates that martial law can only be lifted when the ‘hot phase’ of the war ends. And Russia controls whether the hot phase ends. So, Putin is demanding that Ukraine do something that Russia itself prevents - and then calling Ukraine a dictatorship for not doing it.

What is genuinely alarming is watching Donald Trump parrot this Kremlin line. The US president has repeatedly called Zelenskyy a ‘dictator without elections’ - language that could have been drafted in Moscow. In February, Trump implied that elections were needed because Zelenskyy’s approval rating was at 4% (it was actually around 57%), and he has suggested Zelenskyy is clinging to power for personal gain.

European leaders were forthright in pushing back against Trump’s comments. The then German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, called it ‘simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelenskyy democratic legitimacy.’ Keir Starmer explicitly invoked the British wartime precedent, noting it was ‘perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during wartime as the UK did during World War II.’ Even Zelenskyy’s domestic political rivals - Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko - have publicly rejected wartime elections as impractical and illegitimate. None of this is about protecting Zelenskyy; it’s about protecting democracy itself.

The irony of Trump’s line is exquisite and nauseating in equal measure. Trump has never - not once that I can find - called Putin a dictator. This is a man who has ruled Russia for 25 years through elections internationally condemned as fraudulent, who imprisons and murders political opponents, who rewrites constitutional term limits to suit himself, and who launched an unprovoked war of conquest against a neighbouring democracy. Yet Trump reserves the ‘dictator’ label for the man who won 73 per cent of the vote in a free, internationally monitored election and is following his own constitution’s provisions for wartime governance.

Ukrainians themselves understand all this. Polling consistently shows that over 60 per cent oppose holding elections until the war ends - and even more oppose elections immediately after a ceasefire without firm security guarantees. They know that their soldiers cannot leave the trenches to vote. They know that polling stations would become targets. They know that an election held under the gun would not be an expression of democracy, but a farce.

There is a final lesson from the Churchill precedent worth remembering. When Britain did finally hold its election in July 1945, the great war leader lost in a landslide. The British people, freed from existential threat, made their democratic choice - and chose change. Postponing elections in those very specific circumstances didn’t weaken democracy. It didn’t result in the will of the people being denied indefinitely. It simply ensured that those elections took place when they could properly test and implement the democratic will of the people.

That is what Ukraine deserves: not a sham election conducted under Russian bombardment, but a genuine and meaningful democratic renewal when peace allows. If that was good enough for Churchill’s Britain, it should be good enough for Zelenskyy’s Ukraine. Anyone who argues otherwise - whether in Moscow or Mar-a-Lago - is not defending democracy. They are sabotaging it.

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