At first I thought Krzysztof Kononowicz was a joke. “Some clever Polish YouTuber has done some video editing and acting and created an idiot,” I thought. Apparently I’m not the only one. In comments posted about the video on YouTube, someone wrote,

ENGLISH: this is a hilarious electoral TV ad of a guy running for mayor of a town in Poland. The ad, which, incredibly, is NOT a joke, contains a huge amount of unintended humor. The cheesy jingle, the studio’s awful colors, the candidate’s look, and, last but not least, his horribly mangled and heavily accented Polish plus his dumbass ideas have made this video an instant classic of political humor. I’ll be posting my translation on my profile soon.

I even said as much here, in a post that I removed as I thought about it and realized Kononowicz is not a joke, not even unintentionally.Kononowicz was a candidate for the mayor of Białystok. Elections were held Sunday, November 12. He didn’t win. Watch the video, and even non-Polish speakers would have thought there was little chance he could win. But he did garner 3.5% of the votes.

What makes Kononowicz’s candidacy seem like a joke is his naivety. His platform is simple, Catholic, and slightly nationalistic: stop underage drinking and underage smoking; get rid of crime; protect Poland’s Ukrainian border against smuggling; improve the transportation infrastructure. They are all very practical political goals, from an obviously practical man.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kononowicz is not an eloquent speaker. He mumbles as if his mouth is filled with marbles and cotton. He begins by discussing his family, touching briefly on his mother, then speaking of his father (who fought bravely in the war but no longer lives with the Kononowicz family because “he relocated. He’s in heaven now.”), he refers to him as “Daddy.”

He concludes that it’s very much worth it to vote for him because “I am person truly honest, truly fair.” He is not all talk, he assures voters:

“Other parties talk. They talk, and they do nothing. They did nothing for the city of Białystok. And what I said, I will accomplish everything. Because I am a faithful person and a practicing [Catholic]. And I know how to do it. How to fix the roads. How to do everything. How to get rid of cigarettes. How to get rid of everything!”

A simple man. With simple ideas. But necessary ideas.

There is indeed a lot of underage drinking in Poland, as everywhere. Indeed, there’s just a lot of drinking, period, in Poland. Frigid winters and a 19% unemployment rate will do that to a country.

While I’ve only passed through Białystok’s train station on my way to the northeastern corner of Poland, I’m sure the roads there are just as bad as everywhere else in Poland. Poles like to joke that their roads are so bad that even the holes in the road have holes.

I can’t comment on the smuggling on the eastern border more than to say it makes the news regularly. Having lived on the southern border, I know there was a significant amount of smuggling things to the west — cheap alcohol mainly.

These are important concerns, but I never really heard politicians talk about them as directly as Mr. Kononowicz did. And that’s why I’ve come to admire the man. Simple though he is, he decided to try to do something about the problems he sees his fellow Białystokites face. I can almost see him sitting at a table with his friends, probably over a bottle of vodka, saying, “Damn it, I’m going to do something about this! I’m going to stop sitting at this table complaining and go out and do something.”