I think the public, analysts, journalists, and political commentators are almost always asking the wrong question when they talk about kamikaze candidates. Instead of “Can he win?” the right question is: “What is his candidacy actually supposed to achieve?”
In imperfect electoral systems — which the Balkans has in abundance, but hardly has a monopoly on — this model works like a Swiss watch.
My interest in kamikaze candidates started with the documentary The Great Hack, still available on Netflix. It briefly mentions the Trinidad and Tobago elections and the ‘Do So’ movement, which flipped the script back in 2010. Here’s what actually happened.
A classic kamikaze candidate is visible: on the ballot, with a name or party behind them, exposed to attack from other contestants. ‘Do So’ was different. The ruling party secretly founded it on advice from the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica. Their research showed they’d lose if young voters turned out in numbers. So ‘Do So’ didn’t run candidates or a list. Instead, it ran a campaign against participation — pushing an entire generation to boycott the election or spoil their ballot.
Votes were suppressed through boycott, not through a rival candidate. Far cheaper, too: no candidates, no campaign infrastructure to fund, no approval ratings to defend, no paper trail — the movement vanished on election night.
And “they’re all the same, don’t vote / spoil your ballot” is one of the oldest kamikaze slogans in our region. We experienced it firsthand during the 2012 presidential runoff. Whether the ‘blank ballot’ movement emerged spontaneously, or whether someone had already studied the Trinidad playbook from just two years earlier — I’ll leave that for you to decide.
For clarity, let’s split kamikaze candidates into two main categories.
Satellite / Minority Lists
During elections at various levels, lists appear that opposition figures — and analysts — suspect were set up with logistical or financial backing from the ruling party. Their job isn’t to clear the threshold. Their job is to bleed the opposition’s vote. If they actually do clear the threshold, that’s a bonus.
Presidential Candidates
In presidential races almost everywhere in the world, you’ll regularly find candidates with zero chance of winning. They serve either as tools for controlling polling stations, as attacking dogs, or as punching bags. Their only campaign function is to drag attention away from the main political issues and the frontrunners.
Some will disagree, but in my view the most famous kamikaze candidate in the world is Bernie Sanders. For decades he stepped into the ring against politically unbeatable opponents with far greater resources and institutional backing. His Democratic presidential bids, run from the position of an independent democratic socialist, were widely described as ‘kamikaze’ campaigns — not designed to win, but to drag the center of gravity of the debate to the left.
In the political history of Serbia and the region, the undisputed title of most famous kamikaze candidate belongs to Luka Maksimović, better known by his alter ego Ljubiša Prletačević Beli. In the 2017 presidential election he pulled off the most celebrated — and certainly most successful — political kamikaze operation in the Balkans, consciously mocking the entire political system. Unlike conventional politicians fighting for power, Maksimović built the Beli character with one explicit goal: to render Serbia’s political scene completely absurd. He entered the race with no budget, no infrastructure, no serious platform — riding a white carriage, dressed in white, promising voters jobs in a spaceship factory and an inland sea in Mladenovac. His ‘kamikaze’ mission was a complete success: he won nearly 350,000 votes (9.56%) and finished third, ahead of seasoned politicians with far larger budgets. After election night, the fictional Beli character politically ‘disappeared’ — whether that was planned or not, actual power was never his aim. Satirizing the system was.
Borislav Pelević (presidential elections 2002 and 2004) is a textbook example of a party soldier who knowingly accepts the kamikaze role to keep his party alive. He ran for president when the party’s ratings were in freefall, fully aware he had no chance against the DOS candidates on one side and Vojislav Šešelj on the other. But he achieved what he set out to do — serving as a political shield to keep the party visible in the media, sacrificing his own political standing in the process (he polled between 1% and 3%). In the end it wasn’t enough: the party folded and was absorbed into other political options.
Now that the European path is nominally on the agenda of most parties in the region, we can also call kamikaze candidates the leaders of small civic movements and far-right parties who deliberately enter races with positions that have no majority support — painful economic reforms, recognition of Kosovo’s independence, sanctions on Russia — knowing full well they’ll fall below the threshold, just to get their idea ninety seconds of airtime.
What political theory says about kamikaze typologies:
The Wrecking Ball
There are topics the main frontrunner — candidate or party — can’t touch during a campaign. Too costly in points. Too dirty. A serious operation can’t do what the wrecking ball does every single day to stay in the news.
He plays the same role as artillery preparation in war: he pulls out compromising narratives, attacks where no one expects an attack, and pushes the limits of what’s considered acceptable in a normal campaign. That space doesn’t open itself.
The logic is simple: “I take all the negativity on myself. You stay the one who brings good news and calms people down.”
The Vote Splitter
A kamikaze candidate doesn’t need many votes from the perspective of whoever deployed him. Usually 2% to 5% is enough — taken from exactly the right opponent, at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right city.
That’s why the kamikaze is always chosen to closely resemble the main opponent: similar language, similar visuals, similar voter base. His job is to bleed their main rival specifically.
The ‘regime opponent’ who drains opposition votes. The ‘patriotic’ candidate who siphons off right-wing and nationalist voters. The ‘civic’ option that weakens the center and the greens.
Watch the political scene in the region closely and you’ll see all of them are already there. And all of them are very active.
The Attacking Dog
While the real candidate runs a positive campaign and tries to stay above the fray, someone else is operating on the dark side of the moon.
The attacking dog provokes — but also absorbs blows. He creates noise and forces the opponent to waste energy, time, and money on the wrong things.
Remember: these candidates and their campaigns are not accidents, and they’re certainly not improvisation. This is elite division of labor, grounded in research and focus groups, in a professionally run campaign.
In regions with deeply polarized electorates — and polarized media to match — the Balkans has no shortage of either — this is the most common model.
The Long-Game Loser
Sometimes a candidate consciously sacrifices himself. He’s not campaigning for the next election. He’s campaigning for the one after that.
His campaign is primarily a testing ground for messages that aren’t yet ready for the mainstream electorate. Many movements that now govern in the region started exactly this way. They lost the first election. Then the second. They won on the third try.
The Viral Kamikaze
This is the newest breed. A political product of the social media era and its algorithm.
His strength isn’t infrastructure. Not a party, not ground operations, not strong local chapters. His strength is virality and conflict online, usually amplified by deliberate exaggeration designed to harvest likes.
This candidate and his campaign feed off the algorithm. There’s no platform — just scandals, produced as content. His deepest ambition is to turn an election campaign into a reality show format. He almost never wins. But winning isn’t the goal. Diverting attention, disrupting his opponents’ narrative, and exhausting them is.
In environments where the media space — social media especially — is already overcrowded and emotionally overheated, the effect of this kind of campaign is disproportionately powerful on every voter in the race.
Why We Need to Watch Kamikaze Candidates More Closely Than We Did Twenty Years Ago
I still believe that in political campaigns, substance matters: the economy, infrastructure, social policy. Unlike me, many politicians seem to think social media is a magic wand that’ll carry their campaign to victory. It won’t — experience consistently shows that elections are won on the ground. Local chapters. Actual conversations with voters. Discipline in message delivery.
That said, with social media’s growing influence, we need to be far more careful — because a single viral conflict can redefine the entire narrative of every candidate in the race. When that happens, a small movement, party, or candidate can become strategically decisive in forming a government.
The kamikaze candidate doesn’t mobilize rational voters. He targets the irrational ones — often less educated, usually already angry — and triggers fury and identity panic, wrapped in a narrative of national betrayal.
There’s no platform. There’s only the manipulation of the deepest emotions. The more intense those emotions, the better the campaign performs. While the ‘normal’ candidate talks about the budget, corruption, reform, and EU integration, the kamikaze candidate talks about who’s a traitor, who’s a thief, and who isn’t really one of us. Add some anti-vax content or flat-earth material and you’ve got maximum reach.
When you analyze these candidates, ask yourself a few questions: Is he splitting a coalition? Is he pushing his opponent into a mistake? Is he changing the main campaign narrative? Is he polarizing voters? Is his negative campaign suppressing turnout? Is he introducing a topic that wasn’t there before?
If the answer to any of those is yes, he’s done his job. Probably without winning a single seat.
Before going down this road, think carefully — because these campaigns carry a real cost for developing democracies. Over time, they turn elections into a permanent verbal war and shrink the space for normal politics.
Media and voters become addicted to conflict, because every subsequent campaign has to be more intense than the last. Every kamikaze has to be more extreme than the one before. And then, one day, the most extreme one of all shows up — and he won’t seem strange or dangerous to society, because everything that was abnormal until yesterday has become normal.
When conflict becomes our everyday reality, the question of who is the most capable candidate ceases to matter. All that matters is whose campaign team manages anger, fear, and attention best. The views and likes help, too.
To me, that’s not politics. It’s a substitute for something else. Something far more dangerous than it looks at first glance.
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