During the 2020 Lviv mayoral election, Roman Matys addressed the city’s residents with a manifesto on making Lviv the business capital of Ukraine.
I want to offer you the chance to become richer. Students, pensioners, factory workers, office managers — every one of you! When people ask me why I decided to run for Mayor of Lviv, that is my answer.
Throughout the unofficial campaign, which some candidates started months before the official launch in breach of the rules, I did not hear a single proposal on how to make Lviv Ukraine’s business capital. Everyone competes over who will spend the budget better. And I always ask: what budget? When all infrastructure improvements in the city are funded by loans.
No one talks concretely about how to increase the number of businesses in the city, attract new investment into different sectors and create jobs; how to give Lviv residents skilled work and decent pay. No one says that it is business that fills the budget: it pays for playgrounds and sports grounds, school repairs, road reconstruction and even new trams.
Only when Ukrainian entrepreneurs and foreign investors feel comfortable and safe in Lviv will new jobs appear, competition for workers begin, wages rise, working conditions improve and contributions to the pension fund and the local budget grow significantly. Then we will finally be able to afford the promises other candidates are making now.
I am convinced that success is about money. More precisely, I know that material success and the well-being of every family, when you do not have to worry about basic needs, is already success. I know it not only because I have been an entrepreneur all my life, but because for the last five years — the length of a mayor’s term — that is exactly what I have been doing. Thanks to my team’s work, 75,000 jobs were created, 336 businesses launched and USD 655.5 million of investment came into the regional economy.
Now it is time to do the same in Lviv. My plan is 100,000 new jobs over the next 5–8 years. Enough coffee — time to work!