This Sweet Word Electorate
WE ELECT AND ARE ELECTED, WHICH OFTEN FAIL TO COINCIDE
The parties are recounting their ranks in anticipation of the elections, as if they were birds preening themselves on the eve of mating rituals. There seem to be a great many parties, enough to cater to any taste. But when it comes to making a real choice, it appears there are very few parties. Once, this kind of barren ground saw the sprouts of hitherto unknown and now little known Greens. Perhaps, a part of the young electorate voted for them, thinking that green is just the color of a certain strategic partner’s money. But, in any case, the Greens saw their heyday in those parliamentary elections in Ukraine (for the second time after anarchist Nestor Makhno). Voters are unlikely to go down the same garden path again.
Today’s existence of parties is complicated by the fact that they have proven to be useless because they have long and uneasily existed well away from their voters. In essence, they evade the woes and joys of their voters until the crunch in the form of election time comes Now the parties have driven themselves in the fifth corner (not to be confused with Vyacheslav Pikhovshek’s former television program). They have to tell their voters about how passionately they love them and how they are ready to solve all their problems if the voters give the parties their wallets, that is, votes.
For this reason, the parties have entered the period of wedding associations. They mate to make it easier to fish for voters. Strong parties rely only on themselves, but others also want to take part in this fishing trip, so they herd together to catch voters. They lay ambushes, trying to wind the voter round their little finger, as if saying: look, we are not those who flopped in the last elections, we are totally new and oh so good.
Most parties constitute serious problems for the voter because he/she knows nothing about them. He/she must scratch his/her head for a long time to recall the epoch-making projects each of the parties is responsible for. The parties are prepared for everything to embrace the voter. We sometimes have a nasty feeling that our parties are very sleek, but the voter is a wrong, fastidious, soul-searching, and prone to recall bad things.
Let us consider some types of our voters from the viewpoint of parties, for nobody else looks at them this way.
Disillusioned. This is quite a frequently seen class of a voter. He remembers all the many things he was promised. He knows he will be cheated the way he was yesterday and the day before. Under perestroika he went to all the rallies and listened to all the speakers. Today he suddenly has understood that the loud orators have again spawned a new breed of nomenklatura that has not the least interest in him. He is ready to run the risk again because he still preserves a rudimentary feeling of association with political processes. The parties will try to arouse this feeling, but this voter is now prepared to believe new people, not new words.
Protest. This voter will believe neither new words nor new people. He has overstepped the physiological threshold of survival, scraping along on a minimal wage or pension, and is in fact unable to understand why he was thrown overboard. He has worked all his life and thought that it would be better tomorrow. But he now suddenly sees that this tomorrow will never come. This voter looks on any representative of the authorities as an enemy. It is very difficult to bring this voter to a different frame of mind. This is why he prefers outlandish parties and leaders.
Interested. This is mostly the younger generation ready to listen to party leaders. It is ready to heed both new words and new people. But young people usually like successful personalities, so they will not opt for protest-type parties. Young people need a concrete future, a fashionable, if you like, model of the future. If offered the party of fans of dark glasses, they will be ready to follow it if a sufficient number of fashionable idlers sign on. Better still if each new party card holder gets a pair of dark glasses to boot.
Active. All parties have this kind of followers. They look like rock fans. They will accept anything their favorite party leaders say or do. Active followers carry party ideas to the masses: they will discuss them on a bus, with the people next door, and relatives. A party is lucky if it has such a qualitative reserve.
Indecisive. This is the main object of party efforts. These are those who cannot make up their minds. More often than not, they fail to do this even on the eve of the elections. This is for the parties the largest and most lucrative class of voters. For their task is to win over precisely this stratum before anybody else can
The number of parties has already exceeded one hundred and is still rising, while that of voters is on the wane for purely demographic reasons. And God forbid if they ever meet in quantity!
BUY UKRAINIAN... PARTIES
A party would not be a party if it did not try to woo other parties’ voters. Other parties’ voters are always sweeter. Moreover, after elections parties usually lose a lot of their voters. For the virtual tomfoolery is dispelled as one election gives way to another. This is why all parties have now taken to political publicity. Having no really firm ground under heir feet, the parties are frantically investing in publicity budgets, i.e., the virtual ground in which they are trying to save themselves. Having no time to speak to the real-life voter, they attempt to tune in the virtual voter to the desired frequency because they only communicate with the so-called generalized voter via the television screen.
In so doing, the publicity makers often enter into a contradiction between what is being said and on behalf of who this is said. Here are some examples. The subject of coal miners is being exploited by Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), while the Democratic Union tackles the opposition. This is strange because they are guided by a gas princess in one case and a presidential advisor in the other, that is, by people who supposedly belong to the entirely opposite camps, as far as the contents of what is being advertised in their political publicity is concerned.
If you look into the essence of the promotional spots, you will notice the obvious manifestation of the laws of commercial advertising. What become decisive is a sign insignificant from the object’s viewpoint but important for the audience. For example, the advertisement of chewing gum is based on the idea that this helps strike up acquaintances. The requirement of meeting the opposite sex, so important for young people, is being matched with the image of chewing gum.
The ideal worker in this field was Ostap Bender, the true founder of PR in the former Soviet Union: he sells to Little Ella all that is required, pushing the secret buttons of her heart. While he does so, a simple tea strainer becomes the sign of belonging to high society, which his client in fact wants to hear.
Ostap Bender invented new stunts, while the parties follow paths well trodden. In its publicity campaign, the Reform and Order Party completely follows the ideology of the Russian Imperial Bank’s commercials. They put out a historical figure, which, naturally, has nothing to do with them, and try to link themselves with it in the ad. The viewer shudders but swallows this, although a nationally-oriented party would do better to borrow clips from Ukraine’s strategic partners other than Russia.
SDPU(o) has gone a different way, creating a series of programs called All-Out Legal Education, which really helps the viewers in real life, answering a host of juridical questions. Moreover, they finish these programs, showing an icebreaker bearing the name of their party, which crushes the ice- floes bearing such inscriptions as Crisis, Corruption, and Crime. The ideology of this political advertisement is an integral part of the programs in the making: it does not hang on its own.
Conversely, the customary political advertisements on the screen tries to play on the form rather than the inherent content. The form can be as effective or ineffective as you like. A party can even write send your mother birthday greetings or two plus two equals four and show its leader’s signature. Moreover, the advertisers throw away so much money that it could furnish whole regions with medicines. Millions of dollars are being spent to warm virtual hearts, while the real voters live without light and heat.
The advertised image of a party should contain real-life points of reference, according to which one could identify if this party is needed at all. Today, the parties studiously dodge this point in their advertisements. They build castles in the air, hoping that the voter will not come up to them to check the strength of the structure erected or will come after the event, when the elections are over. While the bus is still waiting, the voter still has an opportunity to do the checking, but when the bus leaves, leaving the voter standing with his baggage at the station, there will be nobody to appeal to. The elections will have taken place. The winner is not to be judged but to be awarded the badge of a people’s deputy. Nothing else will be heard over the loud music of victory.
Political advertising is getting off to a start, with zero hour rapidly approaching. Parliamentary elections are just as unthinkable without political publicity as Kyiv is unthinkable without Podil. The voter should be prepared for being the object of all those who will be trying, skillfully or unskillfully, to foist their love on him. For this reason the voter should learn not only to watch but also to see through the advertisements, looking at what a given love-exuding party has done practically in the past few years. Parties should not live from one period of political advertisement to another unless they are purely television parties. Living by the laws of the genre, one can be spectacular and witty, but life is not confined to television. Parties should produce the tangible fruits of the way they cared about him, the voter. As to virtual results, our screens are already full of them.
