Candidates Release Excruciating and Possibly Illegal Mexican Campaign Videos Jo Tuckman - The Guardian
go to original April 30, 2015

Antonio Tarek Abdalá channels Pharrell’s Happy video for a campaign ad. (Hora 24)

Politics, so the saying goes, is show business for ugly people. But in Mexico, the current mid-term election campaign is more like the early rounds of a Saturday evening TV talent show.

Rival parties have released a string of excruciating campaign videos based on recent pop hits and golden oldies, with little apparent concern for the sensibilities of their viewers – or niceties of copyright law.

The phenomenon is not new but seems particularly pronounced in the runup to the 7 June vote to choose federal deputies, state governors and local officials – a vote which is taking place amid general gloom about the country’s extreme violence, entrenched corruption and mediocre economic performance.

One campaign features congressional candidate Antonio Tarek Abdalá awkwardly bopping along to a version of Pharrell Williams’s phenomenal global hit Happy – in which the song’s original chorus has been replaced with such gems as “With Antonio Tarek – we will do well” and “With Antonio Tarek – he’s the only one who can.”

Tarek is standing for the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the district around the town of Cosamaloapan in the state of Veracruz, where dozens of bodies were found in a clandestine grave last year.

...“Plagiarism is a tradition here, and nobody is ever sanctioned for it,” said Xavier Domínguez, the Catalan chairman of the political advertising agency Wish & Win. “In a country where human rights are violated all the time, nobody is going to bother about copyright.”

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Mexican Political Ads Just Got a Whole Lot Weirder - and Pointier (Fusion)

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