According to a recent Vision survey, during the last five years of YUSU Presidential elections, there were more joke candidates than women and ethnic minorities. A Guardian poll with the question “Are clowns more honourable than politicians?”, returned with 87% of people saying ‘Yes’. Why are these non-candidates more inclined to nominate themselves while other sections of student society are underrepresented?
Firstly, one has to ascertain what a ‘joke candidate’ actually is, but due to their unconventional nature there is no clear definition. Usually they distinguish themselves from other candidates with outlandish clothing. 2008’s YUSU Presidential election victor, Tom Scott, dressed as a pirate for the duration of his campaign, referencing his leadership of the UK arm of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. 2014’s OUSU President LJ Trup’s ecletic outfit and outlandish headgear made him resemble a washed out 90s raver. The need to be visually different from other candidates, in the case of joke candidates to a garish degree, is a unique feature to student politics; you don’t see Nick Clegg dressing up as a giant yellow bird to get the vote.
This physical manifestation of the joke candidate is almost always accompanied by absurd policies. L.J. Trup’s manifesto was written entirely in crayon and proposed the building of a monorail network connecting the university’s more distant colleges, ending with “The mob has spoken”. Here, Trup combines childishness with a satirical comment on the government’s obsession with infrastructure projects. Tom Scott further supports this link in his 2010 campaign for a seat in Westminster, promising to fix ‘Broken Britain’ with a free roll of duck tape sent to every home, taking the opportunity to satirise the demagogic phrases that politicians love.
Yet this might be seen as a cunning political tactic to disarm the voter with humour and avoid actually engaging with issues that need to be addressed: such issues as student apathy towards the union system, with only 33% voting in last year’s elections considered a relatively good turnout. This drive for student political subversity worldwide, responsible for a fire hydrant coming third place in the University of British Columbia elections in 2006, could be harnessed positively to generate a new wave of enthusiasm in a beleagured system.
It is noteworthy that after victories of both LJ Trup and Tom Scott, they pledged to treat their new position not as a joke, the very opposite to their stance in their candidacies. “I was only running for comedy value, but now I’m in, I will be doing the best damn job I can!” promised Scott who later fell foul to a controversy surrounding complaints by his fellow officers of his lack of YUSU experience. Trup’s campaign video demonstrates that his absurdism was just a façade, ending with “behind this video is a serious message”. In The Oxford Student, he explained it was not a sarcastic comment as his position was not anti-political rather anti-establishment, “I am clearly not a careerist… OUSU positions should not be seen as stepping stones. We should have fun students working for fun students”. Obviously the key to a joke candidate’s charisma is his everyman persona preferable to the perceived humorlessness of ambitious career politicians.
The success of joke candidates is evident in student politics yet on the national stage this has not been the case, as seen with Tom Scott’s bid for the constituency of Westminster in 2010 that landed only 84 votes, 0.2 % of the total. Many ‘joke parties’ became popular in the 1990s but experienced a rapid decline once their initial novelty waned. The Monster Raving Loony Party, founded by the Rock musician Screaming Lord Sutch in 1983, of which their manifesto include such points as “Pokemon to be considered an endangered species” and “seperate passports for terrorists” is this country’s most notorious joke party. Although thankfully, they have never have managed to win more votes than the three main political parties in a general election. They did however gain national acclaim after achieving more votes than the beleaguered Social Democratic Party in the Bootle by-election of May 1990. This led to the dissolving of a party that had once held 25% of the national vote whilst in coalition with the Liberals.
Joke parties in the rest of Europe have been more successful; the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party won 16 seats in Poland’s first free elections. The party stood on an anti-vodka, pro-beer platform in a satirisation of Eastern Europe’s opening up to the West during the democratic transition-period, with the movement spreading to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The party soon split into “Large Beer” and “Small Beer” factions, with the former taking up the more serious name of the “Polish Economic Programme” running in coalition with other small free-market parties in successive elections. Similarly in Iceland, the leader of the Best Party (of whose theme song is “Simply the Best” by Tina Turner), the comedian Jón Gnarr, managed to win the position of mayor of the country’s capital, Reykjavik. Although the party’s success was as a result of a serious public backlash against Iceland’s main parties for their mismanagement of the country’s economy leading to deep recession after the 2008 global financial crisis.
Perhaps the most successful comedian-cum-politician, is Beppe Grillo and his “Movimento 5 Stelle” or Five Stars Movement. M5s caused a stir in the 2013 Italian General Elections when it won 25.5% of the vote. As in Iceland this was a popular reaction to Italy’s corrupt political establishment. Grillo’s novel policies played on this disenchantment, by promising to reduce MP’s pay, using the extra money to investigate party corruption and by using crowdfunding from their supporters for their electoral campaign, having enough left over to donate 400,000 euroes to the victims of the 2012 Mirandola Earthquake. Yet after initial promises that it would be a leaderless movement supporting direct democracy, Grillo has remained the party’s leader, promising that there would be “consequences” for his MPs that had defied the party line for not abstaining from choosing a speaker for parliament. Worringly, Grillo held the Italian Government in gridlock in 2013 after refusing to accept a coalition with the centre-left Democratic Party, even though he himself does not have a seat.
Joke candidates operate on a wide range of humour, from the absurd bordering on the insane to farce and satire. The self-referential humour of joke candidates and parties allows them to rise above their more self-important and grandiose rivals, as they are usually they are made up of people with a sideline in comedy. Where they have been particularly successful is where the traditional political establishment has fallen out of favour with the general public, most notably in the recent European economic crises. This can also be translated to the perceived ineffectiveness or even irrelevancy of current student politics. The final stage of a joke politician’s development is a transition into serious political debate once they have achieved a substantial support base and the novelty wears off. Nevertheless, it can be argued that joke candidates are supported for their fresh approach to politics and dismissed as deceptive and fame-hungry in equal measure.