The Established Entitled Politician is built on the most common type among Romanian politicians. They are someone who has been in politics for a really long time, climbing up the ladder and playing the game, which is why they feel entitled to the top position without doing much to earn it in the campaign.
The design aims to capture the feeling of this with a simple but daunting visual of a candidate who looks down on the audience and feels very heavy and massive – more like a ghostly presence than a real person.
Towards the bottom of the image, the body of the candidate morphs into a brutalist apartment building, a symbol that holds many layers: adding (literal) weight to the image, drawing attention to their monumental, static and outdated identity and a subtle nod to the lingering shadow of the former Communist Party that looms over the early careers of most real-life counterparts of the candidate.
Other campaign materials are used to emphasize on the old-fashioned and terse nature of this candidate: a series of simple postcards printed on the now bygone letterpress, traditional campaign items like pens, lighter or coasters, and my earliest memory of election campaigns, the pocket calendar.