By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist.
What I am going to tell you really happened in the Romanian city of Voinesti. I changed the name of the city and the name of the main character, and added a few black humor details, which make the story more fun, but no less accurate. The story that follows is, therefore, true. Those who doubt its veracity will be convinced if they click on this link https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/17/1.
The year is 2008. The country is, let’s say, Romania. In a fair and democratic election, the residents of the small town of M. decided that Florin Hagi would continue to be mayor for the next four years. The people’s favorite Hagi has been the mayor for almost two decades. His (another) election victory would not surprise anyone if That Florin Hagi was not dead.
The mayor died in the middle of the campaign due to liver problems. In a way, it was the price of power. Hagi owed his popularity in the place, among other things, to the fact that he often drank with his voters in local taverns – he maintained, so to speak, contact with the base. Florin Hagi’s supporters gladly wore T-shirts with his and the image of the famous football player, Gheorghe, which read: Hagi for President.
Florin Hagi died at the age of fifty-seven, at the height of his popularity. The Romanian public was upset by the dead man’s election victory. The European Union, of which Romania is a member, also took a stand on the unusual abuse of democracy. Following the instructions of the EU governing bodies, in which a new form of democracy has been developed, the voting of predetermined decisions and candidates, according to which the democratically expressed will of the people – as in referendums in Ireland, France and the Netherlands, and in Great Britain – should be ignored with the will of Brussels, the Romanian government announced that the result of the elections in M. could not be accepted, and produced a defeated candidate for mayor.
Such a decision by the Government infuriated the local population. The residents of M. insisted that their city was still ruled by Hagi, whom they perceived as a respectable host, incorruptible and dedicated to the interests of the people. The centrist party, whose candidate for mayor in M. was defeated by a dead man in the elections, called the result of the vote a “quasi-democratic travesty” and a gross violation of “not only the election law, but also the natural law”. Columnists from the European capitals’ newspapers have announced the possible consequences of the elections in M. for future elections across Europe. “What if Napoleon Bonaparte appears as a candidate in the next elections for the President of France? What if the English decide to give Winston Churchill another chance as Prime Minister?”
Reporters who visited M. to get acquainted with the unusual case on the spot, were told by one of the mayor’s supporters that he, of course, “knows that Hagi died, but does not want any change”.
It seems to me that the story of the dead man who won the elections is especially about the citizens of the former Yugoslavia. Because…
What if someone registers Tito for running for president in the presidential elections? That is, software called Josip Broz Tito. This means that someone would create a reliable program that would answer only one question: “What would Tito do in this situation”?
What if someone uses a computer to opposes our entire political elite, because the computer is equipped with software made on the basis of available biographical, historical, intelligence, psychoanalytic and other data about Broz and thinks nearly as Tito thought? Or even more lucid than him, because he would be loaded with information about what happened after Tito’s death, that is, about the consequences of his mistakes.
Do you really think that this candidate would stand no chance?
Let’s try to imagine some of the benefits of Tito’s election victory… Imagine, for example, the amount of publicity that such a voting result would bring us, imagine the headlines in The Guardian, The New York Times, Die Zeit, Le Figaro, Corriere della sera, which would say: “Tito won the elections in the former Yugoslavia”; “Citizens of the former Yugoslavia elected a computer simulating a dead marshal as president”; “Silicon Valley on its feet: American technology giants see the outcome of the elections in the former Yugoslavia as the future of global democracy”…
If you ask me, the idea is not irrational. Because it has been empirically proven that Tito can do much better than our government. And it is quite certain that even the dead Tito cannot do worse than them.
But the following question is even more interesting: what if someone registers the dead Amfilohije to run in the elections in Montenegro? He will, one way or another, participate in the elections. Zdravko’s “experts” and the Front and the Democrats will also invoke allegiance to him – all of them will try to leave the impression that they are the hand with which Risto rules Montenegro from the grave. Of course, it is not convenient for the metropolitan to participate in the elections, because the church is, of course, “separated from politics”, but Amfilohije, as it is known, and thus the metropolitan, is no longer alive: this, paradoxically, has created the preconditions for his participation.
Dead people, their ideas and policies, I want to tell you, are very much participating in the elections. Sometimes political candidates run on their behalf; most political candidates are formally alive anyway, but even the most sensitive instruments would not record their brain activity. Sometimes the dead are built into party manifestos; they are sometimes highlighted in the campaign as an ideal to strive for. Policies that invoke tradition publicly mobilize the dead and the dead things: their great idea is that the world of the unborn should be shaped by the world of the dead.
Squeezed between the concepts of Njegoš’s Montenegro, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Amfilohije’s Orthodox Revolution, Saint Sava’s Synod, the legacy of the Montenegrin referendum on independence and many less popular, but no less dead ideas, what we call Montenegro today, wanders and stumbles, trying to cling to something, anything. But the hand stays hanging in the air every time, revealing that where the eye seemed to have perceived a verified value, a solid support – there is nothing.
