Most campaign posters are exercises in flattery. The candidate looks statesmanlike, gazing at a better future, above a promise they will not keep. Partia e Fortë did the opposite. Our posters were the joke, and the candidates, including me, were the punchline.
I was number 28.
My poster is a photo of me holding up a phone, taking a selfie of myself, an infinite loop of self-regard. The caption, in the party’s deadpan official voice, asks the public for help: if you happen to see Valon in a less cheerful disposition, please notify the party organs. It names me directly. It is, in other words, a campaign poster whose entire content is gently mocking its own candidate for being a vain, permanently-content young man taking selfies. I signed off on it happily, because that was the whole idea.
Here is why turning the candidates into self-deprecating jokes was strategically brilliant, and I say that as someone who was one of the jokes.
Every other party used its candidates to project strength, seriousness, competence. By making our candidates mildly ridiculous, on purpose, we did two things at once. First, we were funny, and funny travels. Second, and more important, we were the opposite of the self-importance we were mocking. You cannot credibly satirize a political class that takes itself too seriously if your own posters take yourself too seriously. The self-deprecation was the argument. We were the party humble enough to laugh at its own faces on its own posters, which made every other party’s chest-puffing look exactly as absurd as it was.
The posters worked as a set, too. Lined up together, on the campaign HQ wall and on the street billboards around Prishtina, dozens of young faces each undercutting themselves, they read as a single statement: here is a different kind of politics, one that does not think it is better than you.
I will admit there is a specific, slightly surreal feeling to standing on a Prishtina street and looking up at a billboard that has your own face on it, as a punchline, next to forty others. Most people never see their face on a billboard. I got to, and the billboard was making fun of me, and I had helped plan it. I do not think I will ever have a stranger or better entry on a CV.
The deeper point, the one I keep turning over: the messenger is part of the message, and being willing to make yourself the joke is a kind of credibility money cannot buy. We are asking people to trust a satirical party over the serious ones. Putting our own faces on the line, literally, as the gag, is how we earn it.
More from this campaign: candidate number ten on the official list, the youngest list in Prishtina, and what my 71 votes taught me.
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