Candidate number ten in 2014 was not my first time on a Partia e Fortë ballot. A year earlier, for the 2013 municipal elections, I ran as number 28.
Every candidate’s bio in that campaign was written in the party’s voice, which meant total sincerity applied to complete absurdity. Mine went something like this, translated:
According to legend, Valon Badivuku has never once in his life gotten nervous. His constant smile is, at once, his strongest weapon in dealing with clients, and now, apparently, with voters too.
With an ordinary background and a completely unordinary approach, Valon Badivuku is known, in his circle and beyond, as a young, dynamic, and inventive entrepreneur. His way of doing things, helped along by that smile, got him to co-found the first free education site, Qysh Me. He is passionate about optimizing resources and micromanaging them, and has decided to share that passion with his favorite city. At 25, he runs three successful businesses while feeding his ambitions as an environmentalist, a cyclist, and a ping-pong player.
Valon has served his community well through social media activism, tracking down and publicizing the flaws and problems in our municipality’s current system, so he knows the needs well and is ready to work tirelessly to build a better reality for his children’s future.
He always carries a GoPro, keeping every municipal and central government employee under constant, low-level alert.
I still find the GoPro line the funniest part, mostly because it was close enough to true that people believed it.
This was the election Partia e Fortë actually won, a seat in the Pristina Municipal Assembly, the result that proved the joke had real weight behind it. I wasn’t the candidate who took that seat, but I was on the same ballot, in the same deadpan voice, a year before I ran again as number ten and got a very different personal lesson in what 71 votes actually means.
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