Republic
Írenet Isteresskemar (re)founds Democratic Movement
Months of mud-flinging and petty infighting in the Farmer-Green Alliance are now, it seems, to come to an end: Minister of Foreign Affairs Írenet Isteresskemar, long at loggerheads, in spite of her nominal departure from politics, with liberal party leader and former Minister of the Interior Liris Vesek, has announced that she will be taking the hard-right nationalist faction around her figure out of the party to found a new political force of her own - the Democratic Movement.
"We have had enough," said Ísteresskemar at the rally where she made the decision public, "of the weakness of Liris Vesek. At every turn, she, with her so-called liberal sensibilities, has tried to make us bow down before the onslaught of decadence and degradation that face us - every type of degeneracy she has condoned and sought to make acceptable, too fearful to stand up against any of it, inviting, through her acquiescence, into our country the demons that have consumed the West."
"It has thus," she continued, "come time for us to depart. No longer can the patriots, the sober and hard-working people of our good Istkalen, stand behind this ineffectual idiot. No -we must take matters into our own hands, and forge for ourselves, once again, a movement, a strong movement, founded in the rustic, pure values that we know have kept our families and country alike healthy through the years. Is it thus, with conviction in the power of the traditions and the real people of my beloved country, then, that I return to politics and announce the foundation of the Democratic Movement: a new party that will stand forever and truly resolutely in the defense of the Istkalenic people."
The Democratic Movement will begin its existence with 30 deputies in the National Assembly and roughly half of the Farmer-Green Alliance's local affiliates. Most political experts expect it to command the support of roughly 5-10% of the population, with a ceiling of perhaps up to 20% and a floor, at lowest, at 3%, taking right-wing conservatives away from not merely the Farmer-Greens, but also adjacent parties, from the Populists to the Republican Syndicalists, for whom this political contingent is a fairly major constituency but who nevertheless have made no clear attempts to appeal to it.
For the time being, in spite of the strong, anti-Western line it appears to be taking, the Movement is expected to remain in government without major concessions; Ísteresskemar is known to value her current post as Minister of Foreign Affairs highly, having enjoyed almost full control over the country's foreign policy for what is now almost three years, and is thus thought to be unlikely to abandon her position unless actively forced to.
No figures within the main body of the Farmer-Green Alliance have yet reacted to Ísteresskemar's split, nor are any expected to - though the conflict in the party was an open secret, Vesek and her liberal allies have consistently maintained that Ísteresskemar has been an extra-political figure since her resignation from the party in April, and are not expected to abandon this line.
National Republicans adopt "statist" economic policy
The National Republican Party, party leader Katharina Beck, following a vote of the party congress, has announced, will be running on a "statist" economic policy at the next national election.
"We are," she said to a crowd of thousands in Kirelesile's Revolution Square, "the party of the republic - the party of duty, the party of order, the party of virtue. This identity, these values - we must hold to them with ardor, in every sphere, if we are to remain honest and true."
"I have sought," she continued, "to lead this party out of the abyss, out of the endless compromises and confusions that led it to abandon its foundations in favor of corruption and compradorism and back to these values so high. And already, after just a few months, have we accomplished so much together. We have done away with the old system of machines and local affiliates in favor of a central, unified party organization that plays by the rules. We have swept away the rigid adherence to an ossified, imported conservatism that subordinated the people to clerics and rent-seekers. We have moved away from the dual doctrines of cultural Westernization and political authoritarianism in order to reaffirm the principle whose defence we were created for - the unquestionable supremacy of an indigenous and republican order."
"Now, it comes time to make the final sweep - and make the final sweep we will do. On one last front does our party remain marked by the degradations of the years of opportunism: we continue to support the cancerous individualism of the economic sphere that grows and eats away at our society, through which every man and woman alike somehow finds himself, herself, entitled without duty, through which every man and woman somehow finds himself, herself, liberated of their bonds to society, through which every man and woman is somehow enabled to take from the whole without commensurately giving back. I do not have to speak of it exactly, nor do I have any intention of ever putting its filthy name in my mouth; we know what it is and of the ruin it has wrought, the collapse it has brought to every conceivable corner of our Istkalen."
"It is thus with happiness and pride that I announce that, through all our efforts combined, our party at long last has abandoned its misguided affirmation of this toxic state of affairs in favor of a line far truer to its past, its values, and far better for the people to whom it will always be loyal: we are abandoning total individualism, which always rots and destroys, in favor of of an economic republic just as we have a political republic, where the individual will is subordinated to the needs of the whole: duty, order, and virtue over the libertinian excess to which we have for too long given ourselves - a statist approach to the economic issue, in which expectation, coordination, and planning, organized and promoted by the republican organs of the popular will corporate, will take precedence over the chaos of the clashing individual wills which parasitically suck to dominate, to weaken, and then to, invariably, kill."
While it is clearly Beck's intention to cast the change in policy as a return to form, it is, in reality, an extreme break with tradition. The National Republican Party was founded in part in explicit rejection of statist, centralizing economic policy, with one of the central planks of its original manifesto being the restoration of the traditional craft economy, founded on the individual, through the radical redistribution of property and the re-establishment of the guilds. Moreover, it pursued, in the 26 years it ruled the country as the only legal party, avenues of policy often radical and damaging in nature to this end, even against the mounting evidence pointing towards profound failure. So attached, in fact, is it to the idea of an economy of independent producers that it is widely seen by academics as the originator of the concept in its modern form.
But though Beck may be being dishonest with regards to her justifications, she is being shrewd in both pushing the party away from its traditions and shrouding her push in tradition. As economic inequality and dysfunction both grow, Istkaleners - especially young Istkaleners, un-and-underemployed at markedly higher rates than the rest of the Istkalenic population - have grown increasingly and now exponentially more dissatisfied with the general structure of the country's economy, and just as more curious about new alternatives. With alternatives having been uniformly represented by ultra-radical political forces - the ultra-capitalist, ultra-liberal Social Democrats and the ultra-clerical, ultra-traditionalist Union most of all - however, this curiosity, present as it may be, has failed to fully manifest itself. By both moving itself fully out of the camp of national economic orthodoxy while still presenting a relatively conservative image, the National Republicans may be able to capitalize on this unanswered dissatisfaction.
