I know this is for US politics, but I thought this might amuse you guys: right now in Serbia, there's a fictional character running for president. By that I mean a creation not unlike Colbert's alter ego from The Daily Show. A 24yo student from a small town in Serbia entered local politics as a character created as a parody of current Serbian politics: self centered and corrupt, only openly so. His campaign was so successful that his "party" ended up in second place at the elections for town council and officially entered the local government. He then rounded up a group of non-affiliated expert advisers who helped push through some very positive initiatives and captured the attention of national (and now even wider) news. On a whim, he decided to run for president... It turns out he had almost no problem gathering the needed support for an official candidacy, and is now in fact one of the ten candidates.
Thing is, the ruling party, SNS, whose leaders are the current president and prime minister, has splintered from the radical right wing party which rose in the nineties and went mainstream, seizing the moment when the pro-EU democratic coalition which brought down Milošević basically blew it and lost support, so most of the moderate and progressive voters abstained from the elections, so SNS won by a margin similar to Trump (basic majority of barely enough votes, about a quarter of the population). They're corrupt and aimless, going back to the tried and true model of corruption on all levels, breeding nationalism while taking over local governments and public utilities everywhere, essentially bribing their way through with empty promises, which still work on a lot of people. For example, yesterday's election rally in Novi Sad, where I live, was attended by 30,000 enthusiastic people... who were all bused in from all over the country, just to make it look like their candidate has support in this province, which he clearly doesn't.
It's gonna be really interesting in the coming weeks, because one of a few things can happen: they can either find some way to annul the kid's candidacy, which could be potentially disastrous, because it would be obviously staged, or he could run and draw enough votes away from the usual suspects to make things very, very interesting. Like I said - there are so many disillusioned abstinent voters who are rallying behind this guy right now that I could easily see him getting more votes than anyone could predict.
http://www.rferl.org/a/serbian-presi.../28375875.html
