OPINION: Kissing babies and posing for selfies may still be effective in tickling up voters, but Europe’s recent elections reveal a suite of counter-intuitive new strategies.
The modern candidate might consider adding prison-administered leg irons and arm shackles to their hustings costume, and a charge of conspiracy to commit assault causing harm.
These worked a treat for Ilaria Salis, who is now a new Italian MEP (member of the European Parliament) despite – or because of – a protest rampage in Hungary.
Or you could campaign from an Albanian jail, with a two-year sentence for vote fraud as your campaign mascot, which was the novel approach of Fredi Beleri, now a Greek MEP.
Alternatively, there’s the minimalist option of remaining utterly silent, refusing to submit so much as a photograph, let alone putting up hoardings, and staying off the hustings altogether.
This daring playbook has pitched retired Greek farmer and butcher Galato Alexandraki, 76, into her new career in Brussels. Modest about her ingenious voter manipulation, she told reporters, “I don’t know how this happened.”
Perhaps disappointingly, it probably happened because she was on a nationalist party ticket rather than because of her refreshingly understated approach.
Still, her triumph and those of other unexpectedly elected MEPs honour the resigned sentiment behind the old Antipodean saying, “A drover’s dog could win that seat.”
Seemingly, a name on the ballot alone might now suffice.
Unrepentance and even criminality may actually enhance a candidate’s appeal.
These three look comparatively harmless alongside some other newbies. The EU also gains an assortment of homophobes, antisemites and Holocaust-deniers, opponents of women’s equality, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and a suspected pro-Russian propagandist.
Tentatively on the plus side, Bulgaria elected a hip-hop artist, Itzo Hazarta, who specialises in anti-corruption songs, and the Czechs installed Ivan David, a psychiatrist.
Clearly, this topsy-turvy new electoral orthodoxy has emboldened Britain’s Labour Party to try something new. It recently stunned the voting public with an old-fashioned lesson about the birds and the bees.
Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair appeared in national newspapers making the observation: “A woman is (a person) with a vagina and a man is (a person) with a penis.”
Setting aside what someone awaking from a Rip Van Winkle coma might have made of this incursion into the British general election, it was widely interpreted as a rescue mission for Labour leader Keir Starmer, who had got himself up a gum tree on the issue of gender fluidity.
Starmer had earlier opined that “it wasn’t right” to say that only women had cervixes. He also said a woman could have a penis. Then he clarified that “99.9% of women haven’t got a penis.”
This brought a surge in armchair gynaecologists and urologists flooding Starmer with the biological facts of life – including heavy representation from women voters, whose gist was they wouldn’t thank anyone for a penis of their own and rather wished male penis-owners would be more circumspect about theirs.
Starmer then backtracked to “A woman is an adult female.”
Finally, insiders report, the party encouraged Blair to give his grass-roots, retro verdict on who has what bit of kit, so that Starmer could publicly agree with it, thus hopefully getting himself out of a gnarly political and cultural thicket without head-on confrontation with gender-fluid activists.
Trouble is, Starmer has long repudiated and blanked a prominent Labour colleague, Rosie Duffield, having termed it “toxic” when she said exactly what Blair was now saying.
Executive summary: when a man says it, it’s accurate; when a woman says it, she’s just out to cause trouble.
At least on that basis, there’s a sure-fire seat for Duffield in the next EU elections.
