Endralon

[Zanz]

http://forum.particracy.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2390

[Polites]

HUGAMEST TRIBUNE

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Government Crisis in Endralon

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January 5696 - This month’s elections in the Directorial Republic of Endralon signal a radical shift in Endralonian politics as voters overwhelmingly rejected the Directorialism of the Liberal Democratic Party in favour of a radical break with the past. Two parties benefited from this change in voter preferences, and both represent two irreconcilably opposing tendencies.
 
The Holy Crown Party (SZKP), a hitherto small conservative party favouring a restoration of the House of Syldavia on the Endralonian throne and attracting the votes of conservative, Hosian, and Endralonian nationalist voters, won a plurality of the vote, gaining 32% of the seats in the 250 seat Republican Senate and nearly doubling their seats from the 46 they held in the previous legislature to 80 today. Meanwhile, the architects of the Directorial restoration of 5444, the Liberal Democratic Party of Endalon, suffered a historic loss, losing all but 22 of its seats and becoming politically irrelevant in the new legislature. Two smaller far-right Endralonian nationalist parties, the secular Patriotic Front of Endralon and the Aurorian traditionalist Hosian National Union, have also returned representatives to the Senate for the first time, and although their vote share is relatively small, they have both announced their willingness to join a coalition with the Holy Crown Party, which would have a razor-thin majority  of just one seat in the legislature.
 
Further complicating the situation, the Zergonese People’s Party (SLS), a Zergonese nationalist and separatist center-right party, won a near unanimity of votes and seats in the Zergonese-majority Cantons of Zergon and Kundar, and its leader, Lujza Horváthová, threatened to boycott the Senate and even to begin organizing an independence referendum for all Zergon should either of the two far-right Endralonian parties enter government.
 
SZKP chair Dr. Viktor Orsós finds himself in an untenable situation. His party may have won the election and he may have a clear path to the premiership, but that path demands compromising with two far-right parties, something many of the Holy Crown voters would find repugnant and which may even threaten the unity of the Endralonian state. Opposition is also not an option, as no other coalition is politically or mathematically feasible, save an extremely unlikely alliance with the Zergonese nationalists. And the republican bloc has been effectively obliterated so even if it were not profoundly ideologically opposed to collaborating with monarchists, the Holy Crown Party cannot count on their support for a new government.
 
In spite of the SZKP’s distaste for the Patriotic Front and the Hosian National Union, they did not explicitly rule out a potential monarchist-far right coalition. As Dr. Orsós has been called by President Miklos Stern to form the next Council of Directors, the question now is how much the monarchists are willing to sacrifice in exchange for power.

[Polites]

HUGAMEST TRIBUNE

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Secession Threat Looms as Far-Right Government Sworn In

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January 5696 (backdated) - Following the electoral victory of the monarchist Holy Crown Party (SZKP) in this month’s election, the stability and very existence of the Directorial Republic is now being questioned. Though the SZKP won a plurality of votes and seats in the Republican Senate they have no means of enforcing their primary electoral promise: the restoration of the House of Syldavia to the Endralonian throne. The emergence of the Kerisian Empire under the Montalivet-Syldavia dynasty, the only surviving branch of the house of Syldavia, inflamed monarchist sentiment in Endralon and equally appealed to Endralonian nationalists and irredentists, who now see a potential personal union with the Empire as a stepping stone towards a political union with their brethren in New Endralon. This context explains the rise of both the SZKP as well as the two far-right parties (the Patriotic Front of Endralon and the Hosian National Union), but also the explosive growth in Zergonian separatism, embodied by the Zergonese People’s Party (SLS).
 
As the monarchist-far right coalition has a narrow one seat majority in the Republican Senate the inevitable has occurred. A new government has been sworn in, led by SZKP leader Dr. Viktor Orsós and with the participation of the Patriotic Front and the Hosian National Union. The coalition agreement contains much that proves worrisome to both the Zergonian minority and the republican opposition. The new government has pledged to establish close economic, cultural, and political ties with the Kerisian Empire, to organize a referendum for the restoration of the monarchy, and to crack down on illegal immigration, the use of languages other than Endralonian in official settings, and LGBTQ rights.
 
True to her word, SLS leader Lujza Horváthová announced that the party she chairs will henceforth boycott the Republican Senate and will initiate a binding independence referendum in Zergon and Kundar ‘at the earliest possible date’. The constitutionality of such a referendum is questionable, as although the Directorial constitution allows the Canton Senates the rights to organize and implement referendums, federal law overrides canton law in case of a conflict, and there is no recognized right to secede referenced in the constitution.
 
In the meantime peaceful protests, both in Zergon and elsewhere in Endralon, have been planned for the following days in opposition to the new government, but also a pro-monarchy rally is due to take place in Hugamest. The ultimate question is whether Dr. Orsós’s fragile coalition, built on dreams of monarchist revival and ethnic and religious grievance, can govern a country pulling itself at the seams.

[Polites]

HUGAMEST TRIBUNE

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Government Collapse

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April 5699 - After a tumultuous three years, the monarchist-far right government coalition under Grand Director Dr. Viktor Orsós has finally collapsed. The past three years have been marked by chaos and violence, as the far right Patriotic Front of Endralon and the Hosian National Union, junior partners to Dr. Orsós’s Holy Crown Party (SZKP), have pushed through several controversial reforms that the SZKP begrudgingly agreed to support. At the same time the Zergonese separatist Zergonese People’s Party (SLS), true to its word, has boycotted the Republican Senate, effectively granting the governing coalition a comfortable parliamentary majority but also questioning its democratic legitimacy. Another SLS threat, an independence referendum in the Cantons of Zergon and Kundar, has yet to materialize, but the SLS-dominated Cantons have effectively been acting as de facto independent states as they have refused to implement federal legislation. This has sparked violent street clashes between Zergonese and Endralonian nationalists throughout the territory of the Directorial Republic as well as a threat of military intervention into the breakaway Cantons.

A radical proposal put forth by the Patriotic Front and backed by the Hosian Union which would have banned the use of Zergonese and other minority languages in any public setting was the ultimate catalyst for the collapse of the coalition government. The SZKP refused to support this proposal, and as a consequence the two junior coalition members withdrew from the governing coalition. Though they have not yet launched a vote of no confidence, the days of the minority SZKP cabinet are clearly numbered. Whether this political divorce within Endralon’s right wing will lead to some form of rapprochement between the monarchists and the Zergonese nationalists, or whether this will just result in a deepening of Endralon’s political crisis remains to be seen.

[Polites]

HUGAMEST TRIBUNE

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Directorial Republic Abolished

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April 5670 - Following government paralysis and civil unrest in the aftermath of the collapse of the Endralonian government in April last year, an unlikely compromise has emerged. The monarchist Holy Crown Party (SZKP) and the Zergonese nationalist Zergonese People’s Party (SLS) have reached an agreement to radically reform Endralon and to put an end to the Directorial Republic established in 5444.

To that end, SLS lawmakers dropped their boycott of the Republican Senate to vote on one crucial measure: the election of a Constituent Assembly this past January, replacing the legislative elections. The Constituent Assembly had 25 delegate seats, and after three months of fierce debate produced a new fundamental law which has been ratified in a referendum this month, with 57% of voters supporting the adoption of the new constitution.

The main provisions of the new text are a compromise between the monarchism of the SZKP and the separatism of the SLS. Instead of restoring the monarchy of the House of Syldavia, the new constitution instead adopts the medieval doctrine of the Holy Crown, that is the idea that the sovereign of Endralon is the Crown itself, and not the monarch who wears it. This doctrine was most famously invoked in 1520, when the Selucian monarchy of the House of Audierne was deposed and Endralon became an aristocratic republic under the Holy Crown. Same as in the 16th century, Endralon will henceforth become a crowned republic, officially known as the Lands of the Holy Crown of Saint Ottokár. Instead of a monarch, the head of state will be the Protector of the Holy Crown, elected by universal suffrage for a single non-renewable 7 year term and with largely symbolic powers. And instead of granting Zergon its independence, the new constitution offers it extensive autonomy, with its own constitution, legislature, police force, and authority on internal affairs including culture, education, and taxation. Endralon will become a binational federal republic composed of two Crownlands, the Crownland of Zergon (consisting of the former Cantons of Zergon and Kundar) and the Crownland of Endralon  (formed of the remaining Cantons). The ancient name Sildova (the ultimate origin of the name of the House of Syldavia) has been resurrected as the short name of the Lands of the Holy Crown of Saint Ottokár.

The institutions of the new crowned republic grant Zergon effective veto power. The legislature will be the bicameral Crown Diet. The upper house will be the Federal Council, formed of 20 members, with the government of each Crownland appointing 10, and any law that affects the functioning of the Crownlands must be approved by the Federal Council. The lower house will be the Chamber of Deputies, elected through proportional representation by the citizens of both Crownlands, and thus naturally having a higher number of representatives from the Crownland of Endralon. The executive branch will continue the collegial traditions of the Directorial Republic and will be called the Federal Council of Directors. The 7 member body will be elected in a joint session of both houses of the Crown Diet and will serve for 7 years. Instead of a head of government, the Federal Council of Directors will be headed by a President of the Council, a position which will rotate annually among the 7 members of the body.

This compromise, while presented as a victory by all those involved in drafting it, leaves all dissatisfied. Instead of the restoration of the monarchy, all the SZKP could achieve was a reference to the Crown in official titulature. Instead of an independent Zergon, the SLS ultimately acquiesced to increased autonomy. And the republican parties were unable to prevent the death of their beloved Directorial Republic. Still, they have all shown a willingness to maintain this system for the foreseeable future, or at least as long as the current balance of power remains unaltered. The only ones who remain radically opposed to the new constitution are the two far right parties, who are best positioned to benefit from any future crisis questioning the validity of the crowned republic. But for now at least, the Lands of the Holy Crown of Saint Ottokár are here to stay.

[novarei]

The Open Question

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A Season under the Holy Crown

By: Suyin Chow from Hugamest, the Besplatno Valley, and Zergon — April 5738

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My plane landed in Hugamest a little after dawn, and the first thing I must report is the airport, because the airport is a thesis. It was built, rebuilt, Béla would later correct me, everything here has been rebuilt, in the style of the High Kingdom: vast eclectic halls of honey-coloured stone and cast iron, domes ribbed in green copper, arcaded galleries stacked one atop another like the tiers of a wedding cake, every façade carved, every spandrel gilded, the whole thing less a terminal than a basilica. The walls of the arrivals hall had murals two storeys high, the Conquest Tribe fording a river under a bronze sky; the coronation of Saint Ottokar with the Holy Crown; a scene I could not identify of a bishop blessing soldiers before a burning city, which I would learn soon enough. The floors shone, the brass freshly polished.
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And here is what I did not see, though I had been told to expect it: the Leader. No portrait forty feet high, no slogans, no cult of personality. I have arrived in a dozen countries called authoritarian and been greeted by these outward symbols of authority.  In Hugamest the only faces are dead kings and saints.
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My driver was waiting past customs with a hand-lettered sign and a stomach that preceded him by a comfortable margin. Béla is Zergonese, from the provinces, his luthorina is spoken in a thick accent.
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"You see the airport?" he said, before I had fastened my seatbelt. "Sixty years ago, a shed! A shed, Miss Chow. Rain came in. Now look. In Kundrati they have airports like bus stations and bus stations like ruins." He chuckles to himself.  "Here even our ruins are repaired." He pulled into traffic. "I will show you the city. You will not believe."

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The City
He was right, and I did not believe.
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I had read the some histories before coming. Hugamest at the founding of the crowned republic was by every account a dilapidated place, a capital of crumbling "directorial" brutalist monstrosities and decaying rotting factories. The old grand avenues where pot holed, large swaths of the city were dominated by uniform, utilitarian blocks. What has happened since was perhaps a greater physical revolution than the directorate political one. A total renovation, two decades of demolition and construction on a scale that flattened whole quarters and raised them again to a single coherent plan. Great boulevards have been driven through the brutalist tangle, lined with façades of that same honey stone, often six storeys, mansard roofs, wrought-iron balconies, ground floors of arcaded shops, anchored on something: a domed church, a colonnade, an equestrian saint. New old styles, different districts under reformed styles of varios anciant and long gone monarchies. The neo baroque of the Fifth Kingdom of Endralon of the late 4600s. Romanesque of the 21st and 22nd centuries. And a unique Art Nouveau of the current long time President of the Federal Council  Mátyás Várkonyi.
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Béla narrated all of the renovations. "This boulevard, ten years old. Looks like two hundred, yes? That is the skill. New pipes, new wires, new metro underneath, new old eh!" He took both hands off the wheel to gesture at a façade. "The Old Man [Mátyás Várkonyi] said a people who live in ugliness learn to behave with ugliness. So. No more ugliness."
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Whatever else this regime has done, it has presided over a boom: new industry in the ring towns, new rail in every direction. The cafés are full. The shop windows are full. The trams are full, new and run to the minute. 

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The Dancer
One cannot go to Hugamest without seeing the ballet, it was there I met Marek, a principal of the National Ballet, Zergonese by birth, twenty-six years old. We met in a rehearsal hall of the National Theatre of Mihály III, where he had just spent three hours on a revival of a folk dances, the sort of material that thirty years ago, he told me, would have been museum work.
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"Now we turn people away," he said. "Even the standing places sell out." He said.
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Marek finished practice, and invited me to church. The churches of Hugamest are full. Not attended, full, at weekday masses, full of young men and women. Not a single grey hair to be seen.
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I asked Marek about this revival, his answer was to unbutton his collar and show me the medal he wears against his skin: a severe profiled head, mitred, encircled with lettering I could not read. "Saint Péter," he said, and when I looked blank, with gentle patience he said: "Erdő. The Archbishop. You do not know him?"
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I know him now. Péter Erdő: a priest of a millennium ago, a field chaplain through eight years of the Second Civil War, wounded at the front. He would late become Primate of all Endralon in the "catastrophe" of 4733; who buried his king and his friend, fed the defeated, ruled the broken country for a term and then, and this is the part every Endralonian tells you with the same reverence, walked away. Refused re-election. Retired to a monastery to mourn and to study, and died there. In the intervening centuries Endralon become one of the most secular states in the world. Nearly four centuries of political seesawing between monarchies and directorial republics led to a great exhaustion with history. Seventy years ago it all seemed settled, a secular, very nearly atheistic directorial republic become triumphant. Yet somehow, perhaps the malaise, the grey buildings, the long slow economic stagnation, but in the last fifty years, the young in Endralon have become the vangaurd of a reborn faith.  
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"He is why I believe," Marek said simply. "Not arguments. Him. A man like that existed, in the worst time we ever had. So the thing he believed cannot be nothing." He rebuttoned his collar. "The new Archbishop is the same kind. You should hear him. E"
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The new Archbishop, Primate of all Endralon, a man of perhaps sixty, a canon lawyer, another son of a small town, is by broad agreement the second-most important man in the country, and the only one whose portrait you do see, in shop windows and parlours, beside the Saint's. He preaches to a full cathedral but much like the Old Man is otherwise enigmatic. 
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"You are looking for the trick," Marek said to me as I left  kindly, because everyone here says it kindly. "There is no trick. We were a people who believed in nothing, and we were miserable. Now we believe."

-The view from the  National Theatre of Mihály III

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The Countryside
Béla drove me south out of the capital on a grey Thursday, and within an hour the reborn city of Hugamest faded. The old republican and directorate styles returned. Concrete and blocks.
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The renovations of the capital do not reach the Besplatno Valley. The new trains pass through it without stopping much. The villages here are poor,  and unlike the city, old. And the politics are poor too, as Béla told me. "This is republican country." The valley voted against the crowned republic in the referendum of 5670. The old parties of the old regimes survive here as the folk-religion survives elsewhere: in the family, at the kitchen table, in the way a man will call the Protector "the president" with a flat deliberate wrongness, like spitting.
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I stayed two nights with a farmer, Tódor, in a stone house his family has held, he said, "since the second republic, or the third. One of the good ones." He is seventy and he laid out his politics unasked.
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"They will tell you in Hugamest that everyone believes now," he said. "Here is what I believe. I believe my grandfather voted in real elections, where you did not know who would win. I believe a republic means the big man goes leaves office sometimes. Didnt their "saint" do that. This one has not gone home in twenty-seven years." He refilled my glass. "And I will tell you what makes me spit. It is not that he robs us though all those pervert priests I bet are. It is that he has made everyone grateful. A whole country, grateful, like a dogs. My grandfather was a citizen. That was how he introduced himself, as citizen! I am a well-fed dog."
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I asked him whether he went to church.
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"For weddings. Funerals. And I guess when my sister insists. I am not one of those brain washed kid marching off to church." He points at a bunch of young people, dressed in old folk dress, going into the chapel accross the street.
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"Look at them," he said. "They think this is rebellion. We were rebels, actual fighting fascism, we lost sure. What is their rebellion?Fasting and babies. Every generation I guess must invent a way to annoy the old."

Part 1.