There is a difference between running the social media for a satirical party and putting your own name on the ballot for it. On 16 May 2014, Partia e Fortë submitted its list of 64 candidates for Kosovo’s parliamentary election, and I was on it. Number ten.
You can still find the list. Telegrafi published the full roster the day it was certified: Partia e Fortë garon me 64 kandidatë për deputetë. Scroll to number ten and there is my name. Bota Sot covered it too, a few days later, when the final list had grown to 67 candidates: Partia e Fortë paraqet listën zyrtare për deputetë. My name is in the first ten there as well.
I want to write about why that felt like a bigger step than everything that came before, because I think it says something about satire that is easy to miss.
Every candidate got a card with a promise on it, and mine was this: that as an MP I would work to advance the wiretapping system in Kosovo, so that every citizen could carry out a wiretap without any trouble. A public service, offered to all, in the tone of a man who has thought hard about the national interest. It is the party’s whole method in one sentence, a real and slightly grim fact of Kosovar political life restated as a benefit the state should extend to everybody. We had been running that particular joke since 2012, when the party announced that its members’ wiretapped calls were all in flawless grammar. Two years later I was standing behind it with my own face and my own ballot number.
For a couple of years my work had been behind the feed. I shaped the voice, ran the channels, thought about timing and distribution. All of that is real work, but it is also work you can do from behind the curtain. The party is the character; you are the puppeteer. Putting your name on a candidate list is different. It is stepping out from behind the character and saying, in public, in an official government document, that you stand behind the joke. That you are willing to be counted for it.
That was the whole point of the 2014 run, as I understood it. A satirical party that only ever lives online can be dismissed as anonymous mischief. A satirical party that files 64 real people, with real names, as real candidates for real seats is making a much harder-to-ignore statement: this is not anonymous, we are not hiding, and we are prepared to compete inside the very system we are mocking. The satire only has teeth if someone is willing to sign it.
For me on the digital side, the candidacy also changed what I was communicating. Up to that point the ask to the audience had mostly been “laugh, share, join in.” Now there was a ballot with our names on it, and the ask had to grow up a little without losing the voice. We were still the party that promised everything and meant to change nothing. But now there was a concrete thing to do about it, and I was one of the sixty-four names attached to that thing.
It also meant showing up in rooms the feed could not reach. Being a certified candidate gets you a chair at the televised debates, sitting in a suit under the studio lights alongside people from parties that were entirely in earnest. That is a strange place to be when your platform is a joke, and it is also the exact place where the joke does its best work. You cannot be waved off as an internet phenomenon once you are on the panel, on air, being asked the same questions as everyone else. The suit was real. The lights were real. The answers were ours.
I have a complicated fondness for that list. It is, on paper, an official election document filed with the state of Kosovo. It is also one of the funniest things I have ever been part of, because of what the party stood for. And it has my legal name on it, at number ten, which means that whatever else is true or unprovable about my time with Partia e Fortë, this part is on the record. I ran. You can look it up.
Related reading from this run: my 454-person Facebook survey before the vote and what 71 votes taught me.
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