Satirist shakes up Serbia presidential vote
He campaigns in a Borat-style white suit, sports a samurai-style ponytail and hipster beard, touts a manifesto studded with lunatic pledges and uses a made-up name that mocks politics as the circus of greed. But in his jokey bid to become Serbia’s next president, Luka Maksimovic, a 25-year-old satirist, has caused many not just to laugh but also reflect on their nation’s troubled political scene and generational gap.
Some opinion polls even place the young showman second for Sunday’s vote, ahead of a string of veteran politicians.
Maksimovic, a media and communication student, chose the name of Ljubisa Preletacevic — nicknamed “Beli” (White) — as the fictitious moniker for his candidate. Preletacevic punningly means someone who effortlessly switches loyalty — a jab at the notorious fickleness of Serbian politics.
His key electoral pledge is naked selfinterest: “To steal for myself, but also to give something to the people.”
His campaign video — viewed more than 750,000 times in its first week — shows him dressed in white, riding a white horse and hailing fans while standing in an outdated open-top Mercedes, a posture reminiscent of Borat, the outrageous figure created by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.
On a recent campaign appearance in Mladenovac, Maksimovic’s home town outside Belgrade, “Beli” was mobbed.
“Mr President, I just want to shake your hand and say hello,” a thrilled man in his 50s told the beaming candidate.
“We came from Belgrade just to meet you,” a middle-aged woman shouted from her car. Preletacevic went over to shake hands. “Hit it hard!” he declared, using his movement’s slogan.
Centre-right Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic is the frontrunner in Sunday’s vote and may win by a clear majority in the first round, surveys show.
Some opinion polls place him second, ahead of former ombudsman Sasa Jankovic and ex-foreign minister Vuk Jeremic, deemed Vucic’s most serious challengers.
Maksimovic’s foray into politics began as a joke, when he and a bunch of friends made a video mocking Serbia’s politicians for corruption and greed.
Last year, he led a group of fellow pranksters to a surprise success in a local election, coming second after Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Ten months later, they took on the biggest prize of all: the presidency.
To Maksimovic’s surprise, their support boomed. “All the attention we are getting is a slap to the authorities and the opposition,” he said. “They should ask themselves what they have brought this country to when a fictitious character can run for presidency and people want to vote for him. That shows something is wrong.”
As his popularity has soared, both the ruling coalition and opposition have expressed cautious sympathy for him.
“He shows in a good way how the election process and state institutions have become senseless” in the eyes of citizens, Jankovic said.
Pro-government tabloids darkly linked Maksimovic with billionaire George Soros, who funded independent media in the Balkans in the 1990s, and with a youth movement called Otpor (Resistance). Both are blamed for toppling Slobodan Milosevic, the darling of hardline nationalists.
The young man is expected to attract those usually abstaining from vote, especially millennials, but also those disillusioned by Serbia’s political scene, which has been dominated by the same figures since the early 1990s.
“If he wasn’t running, I wouldn’t bother voting,” a Belgrade student Milena Selakovic said. But her friend Igor Gnus, 20, disagrees.
“He is making a joke out of a very serious thing, which is politics.” Maksimovic says underneath the prank lies concern about generational division and abandonment.
More than 40 per cent of young Serbs are unemployed and many dream of leaving abroad. “We are a forgotten generation, born either just before, during or after the wars,” Maksimovic said, referring to the bloody conflict that erupted in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
“We grew up in chaos and poverty, without a perspective. But now we are showing that we are alive, that we want to fight. These people have been determining our fates for the last 30 years. That’s enough.”