Cinematic Statecraft: Engineering Electoral Choice Through Strategic Storytelling in Eastern Europe
MARIANNA PRYSIAZHNIUK,
PHD STUDENT, UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST;
POLITICAL ANALYST, DEMOCRATIC INITIATIVES FOUNDATION
On April 21, 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy won Ukraine’s presidential election with 73 percent of the vote. While Western analysts struggled to explain how a television entertainer could so thoroughly dominate Ukraine’s political establishment, Ukrainian voters were not surprised. Spanning three seasons, voters had watched Zelenskyy play President Vasyl Holoborodko in Servant of the People, experiencing his fictional presidency across dozens of episodes and multiple emotional arcs. When Zelenskyy announced his real candidacy in December 2018, voters confronted not the question “Can we imagine this comedian as president?” but rather “Should we elect the president we have already emotionally experienced?”
The Ukrainian case represents an extreme manifestation of a phenomenon increasingly visible across electoral democracies: the deployment of long-form fictional narratives as preconditioning that shapes the emotional and cognitive substrates upon which campaigns subsequently build. Unlike traditional campaign communications such as advertisements, debates, and rallies, which are recognized as persuasion attempts and thus trigger critical evaluation, political films operate through what scholars66 theorize as narrative transportation: the psychological state in which audiences suspend critical faculties and process stories experientially rather than analytically.
This article examines three Eastern European cases in which fictional narratives appeared in proximity to electoral cycles: Ukraine’s Servant of the People (2015–2019), Romania’s The Perfect Candidate (2024), and Moldova’s Plaha (2025). While these cases differ dramatically in institutional settings, media environments, and political outcomes, they exhibit structural similarities in deploying narrative frames that align with campaign objectives.
We analyze them not as determinative of electoral outcomes but as components within broader persuasion ecosystems, where strategic storytelling functions as a soft preconditioning mechanism.
