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No April Fool’s Joke: Comedian who plays president on TV leads after first round of Ukraine presidential election

This is not an April Fool’s joke: A comedian leads after the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a political upstart who had never run for public office before, finished first with about 30 percent of the vote on Sunday, followed by incumbent Petro Poroshenko with 18 percent, according to exit polls. The rest of the vote was split among more than a dozen other candidates.

Zelenskiy's only brush with Ukranian politics has been to play the president in a television show called “Servant of the People,” a popular satire about a teacher who wins the county's highest office.