Republic
Ikrat promises "corporativist and social republic," rule modeled on "Lunon and Primo de Rivera"
Elizabeth Ikrat, both leader of the Communist Party and Istkalen's new and controversial prime minister, delivered her inaugural speech yesterday morning, detailing her plans for the country.
In the tradition of the progressive left, she dedicated her government to the "forgotten poor," promising to defend and invest in Istkalen's lowest two classes - its "manual laborers," a class of people for whom labor is theoretically illegal completely, and its "self-dislocated farmers," a group composed of those born in rural areas who illegally moved to the cities and were, as punishment, deprived of the vast majority of their legal and economic rights - in order to make their conditions, legal and material, equal to those of the majority.
In a less orthodox vein, however, she appeared to plot the path to this equality through the thoroughly middle-class workers' associations, calling for them to "dominate the Republic," praising them as "the organs of material and social progress" and the "future engine of an economic socialization both moral and literal," and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, taking the historically radical-right position of demanding a corporatist reform of state, society, and economy with them as base.
"The driving purpose of my government," she proclaimed, "what has been the driving force of all progressives in this country since the revolution of the 18th of April, what is the surest path to true and firm equality and liberty for the Istkalenic people, is the quick establishment of a corporativist and social republic: a government of the people, built upon the workers' associations, concerned with the maintenance of the social welfare, of justice and equity at all turns."
Ikrat further veered into eccentricity by simultaneously claiming inspiration for her ideal state from the far-left Lunon, the founder of the original iteration of the UNSR, and the right-wing Miguel Primo de Rivera, who ruled Spain autocratically in the 1920s.
"Our models," she said, "are Lunon and Primo de Rivera. We shall go forth, as they did, in establishing national progress, national unity, national justice; in overturning and reforming and building until we have made our Istkalen a nation of plenty, of great and common prosperity."
Ikrat's words were not necessarily a deviation from the line of the Istkalenic Communist Party, which has long been close to similar syncreticism in its endorsement of many aspects of the Istkalenic economic system - seen by more orthodox Marxists as a form of petty-bourgeois or conservative socialism - as progressive and communistic.
They were, nevertheless, deeply unusual and strange in terms of the extremity of the melding of right and left they suggested; with them, Ikrat became the first Communist figure in Istkalen to openly call the workers' associations progressive, and almost certainly the first person of left-wing inclination since the 1930s - perhaps of any inclination, anywhere - to simultaneously praise the Lunon and Primo de Rivera dictatorships as ideal.
However, though unusual, they were not necessarily unexpected. With the government being composed of parties from both the far-right and far-left, the development of unusual syntheses was almost certainly a necessity in negotiation - and thus one in actual policy and its presentation.
How the creation of Ikrat's "corporativist and social republic" will proceed in practice remains to be seen.