Manchurian candidate

noun

plural Manchurian candidates

: a politically influential person (especially a politician) who is secretly working for or controlled by an unfriendly power (such as an enemy nation or rival party)

… their current leader came across looking like a Manchurian candidate by not taking allegations of foreign interference seriously …

—Jesse Kline

I defended him in those hearings when some … idiot accused him of being the Manchurian Candidate, that somehow the Vietnamese had brainwashed him.

—John Kerry, quoted in The New Yorker

Ever since he fuelled a hugely disruptive British Airways cabin crew strike just before the 2010 general election and declared the 2012 London Olympics a legitimate target for protests against cuts in public sector jobs, I've suspected McCluskey of being a Manchurian candidate for the Conservative party, programmed to damage Labour interests every time he grabs a headline.

—Martin Vander Weyer

Word History

Etymology

after The Manchurian Candidate (1959), novel by American writer Richard Condon (1915-96); the "candidate" of the title is a politician whose wife is a Communist agent and whose stepson has been turned into an assassin by Chinese and Russian brainwashing in Manchuria after his capture during the Korean War

Note: The novel has been made into films (1962 and 2004), a stage play, and an opera.

First Known Use

1970, in the meaning defined above