1 June 2024
Onward… Together? PM Sees Support Implode, But Likely to Retain Top Spot
Results for the National Diet of the Kingdom of Tavaris. Parties are sorted left-to-right in order of total seat count and are not ordered by government or opposition status, which is yet to be determined. Full results are at the bottom of this article.
NUVRENON– If the Tavari people sought decisive answers from Saturday’s election, they will be disappointed, for there are none to be found. Support for Prime Minister Žarís Nevran Alandar’s party Irínavi Voi! (“Onward Together!,” IV) collapsed but still retained the top spot, falling 201 seats to 358, while nearly every other party saw increases, leaving the Diet more evenly divided than ever before in history. IV’s 358 seats is the smallest that the largest party in the Diet has ever been, and there are no fewer than five other parties that reached 96 seats and attained “major party” status, an unprecedented feat. Coalition governments are not unknown in Tavari politics, especially since the Great War, but the diffuse vote means that, for the first time, it will require more than two parties to assemble a majority. What will follow from here is, for Tavaris, uncharted territory.
It is most likely, but not certain, that when the dust settles, Žarís Nevran Alandar will remain Prime Minister. If this occurs, Mrs. Nevran Alandar, who first ascended to the country’s highest political office without a vote as the Deputy Prime Minister when Sir Shano Tuvria resigned, is likely to become the first Tavari Prime Minister in history to be re-elected twice. It must be admitted that this is an accomplishment, as is the fact that she has retained the largest party status at all, but these are small victories—both of the Diets she led lasted 2 years or less, and a Diet as divided as this one offers little guarantee of lasting any longer. Mrs. Nevran Alandar led a campaign quite high on substance but short on style, with her campaign launch video on a hovercraft owned by her ultra-wealthy cousin widely panned as an out-of-touch boondoggle after it led to travel delays for hundreds seeking passage across the Strait of Kings while the videographers demanded retakes and ended up producing a video which showed, as one Pigeon user said, “the Prime Minister boldly sailing away from Nuvrenon, hopefully never to return.” Her promises to boost tourism and economic competitiveness through several government programmes designed to combat “Analogue Tavaris” resonated with her core supporters—young professionals and centrist suburbanites—but appears to have caused the eyes of most in the public to glaze over and seek other parties with flashier messages.
The second largest faction in the Diet will be The Liberals (Vat Vokaσattidari, VV), who are on 178 seats, their best result since 2015. Up 49 seats from the end of the last Diet and 119 since 2021, Tavaris’ oldest political party is on a well-established upswing after merging with breakaway elements of Žarís’ Nevran Alandar’s party and the minor party Republican Alternative as well as electing a new leader. Henda Lanaš Bettõndra, heir to the billionaire Otan Lanaš Bettõndra who owns the Blõ television network and Premier Rugby Tavaris, was only the second non-Diet Delegate ever elected president of The Liberals, but his barnstorming win in Line Lanaš not only gets him in the legislature, it restores a Liberal to the seat held not too long ago by the Communist architect of Acronian secession, Atra Metravar. VV took back several other seats that were long their safe territory but had been lost to other parties in recent years, such as Lines Vidas, Randrar, and Udrovi, but most notably Line Nuvo, which will now be represented in the Diet by the richest man in Tavaris, Toran Nuvo Ranzalar, who “came out” as a Liberal this election after having publicly supported Green Tavaris his entire adult life.
“What we are seeing tonight across Tavaris is a correction, a correction against the powers-that-be, and it is being done through the power of the people,” said Mr. Nuvo Ranzalar, a multi-billionaire who owns the country’s largest auto manufacturer, lithium mining firm, and media company, in a speech to supporters in Nuvrenon. (Ranzalar Holdings is the Union Media Alliance’s parent company.) “Tavari people are standing up and demanding action on national security, demanding a government that stands up for law enforcement rather than in their way, demanding an end to wasteful deficit spending and the constant shovelling of taxpayer money into frivolous vanity projects and namby-pamby feel-good hogwash like diversity initiatives. This is a message to Žarís Nevran Alandar: step back and listen!” Needless to say, The Liberals stand far apart from Irínavi Voi, and building a coalition is expected to present a significant challenge.
Ostensibly, an easier coalition partner is in Ítan Ladrena (For Democracy, ÍL), whose 134 seats represent a 9 seat loss compared to the end of the last Diet. These are the social democrats and most centre-leaning among the centre-left, the rump of what was once the Socialist Green Party for Democracy (ÍLKES), the truly massive-tent leftward mega-coalition formed in the leadup to the 2022 elections when Acronian independence blew a massive hole in the Tavari political left. Žarís Nevran Alandar at times seemed to find it easier to work with ÍLKES than her own confidence-and-supply partners at times, passing a major reform to the Silver Court and introducing legislation to legalise mobile payment services with ÍLKES support. ÍL leader Kolai Šandra Vencrandíl has hinted at being open to a coalition with IV, emphasising often on the campaign trail that she had “proudly worked closely with the Prime Minister many times.” However, IV and ÍL combined hold only 492 seats, 85 short of a majority, and finding those Delegates is a major challenge because of the nature of ÍLKES’ messy divorce.
The two predecessor parties of ÍLKES themselves had plenty of inherent factionalism—before ÍLKES was the Socialist Party for Democracy, a fractious alliance of socialist democrats and democratic socialists that were so prone to infighting they could not even appoint a single leader to serve as Deputy Prime Minister when they were junior partners in a coalition under Shano Tuvria’s Democratic National Party in 2017. The socialists broke apart into those two factions when they broke off ÍLKES, producing Ítan Ladrena and the democratic socialist and labour movement-aligned Kranσazdi Hamobetar (KH), which has alternately translated its name as the Workers’ Party and the Labour Party. But the green half of ÍLKES broke in two as well, with Green Tavaris (Tavarís Etravi, TE), holding itself to be the same exact centrist green party as has governed Tavaris on a handful of occasions since the 1970s, and Urth (Nezonís, NE), an explicitly left-wing environmentalist faction that has also taken a strong pro-nuclear energy stance. These four parties, who as recently as this year were nominally all comrades and compatriots in one party, are now all bitterly opposed to one another after, it would seem, negotiations and discussions with one another as their party collapsed turned personal. As a result, KH has outright refused to work with ÍL, and neither green party will agree to join a coalition with the other.
KH party president Gabradi Novar Etta is not a member of the Diet but serves in the Enaro Tavar Legislative Council representing Good Harbour. He told a crowd of supporters on Saturday “Only one political party in this Diet has the real interests of real workers at heart, and we will not compromise on our vision and our goals. Unless the Prime Minister agrees to stand with us 100%, she will stand against us in opposition.” Of the party’s 126 seats, about 60 are in Lines traditionally associated with the Tavari northeast, a region of the country long associated with economic decline after its industrial capacity was destroyed in the Great War and by and large never rebuilt. KH’s message appears to have resonated strongly among working class voters, and their association with labour unions has placed them at loggerheads with the Prime Minister, who has been no friend of unions in political office. The party also seems to skew Akronist, picking up several Akronist Lines across the country that had been prime targets for Mõzba, the New Communist Party, though like every political party this election, the party took pains to emphasise that it was welcoming of all religious backgrounds and did not plant any flags in traditional political Akronist causes.
The party Urth might otherwise be a good partner for Mrs. Nevran Alandar who, like them, is quite keen on nuclear power. It is led by Del. Devra Šonai Nadevra, who like her predecessor Shano Tuvria is strongly associated with Tavaris Central University, the largest university in the country by undergraduate enrollment, and of the party’s 60 seats, more than half are also strongly associated with universities and other communities dominated by younger people. NE picked up several Lines in the southwest around Dravai that had previously been reliable performers for Irínavi Voi and the Democratic National Party, undercutting some of their urban support, but largely failed in most of their target seats due in large part to the generally staunch Akronist opposition to nuclear power. With only 60 seats, NE is not overly helpful to the Prime Minister in her electoral calculus, and aligning with it would earn her the outright ire of the much larger TE. And NE has sparred with the Prime Minister on a handful of occasions, strongly opposing lithium mining in Nandrat and demanding massive new taxes on aircraft and watercraft fuel that Mrs. Nevran Alandar has called “absolute non-starters.”
Another party that failed to make much inroads is Mõzba, whose emergence onto the political scene last year made waves in Dravai Province but has so far been largely unable to reproduce that success elsewhere. 49 seats is certainly not insignificant, but at that size and with so many other options, it is almost certain that the Communists will not play any role in government talks and are unlikely to be highly influential in the opposition, either. An overwhelming share of their target seats were taken by KH and NE, leaving the Communists with a small core of seats based largely in the Dravai and Nandrat urban areas. “It is clear that the road to rebuilding the Communist movement in Tavaris will take time,” said Mõzba party president and Dravai Province First Councillor Madra Hendrex, who stated to supporters she is “not going anywhere” and “is in it for the long haul to show Tavaris that a better world is possible for Tavari of all faiths and all walks of life.”
The real jaguar in the room for the Prime Minister is the Tavari National Party (Kranσazdi Danvi Tavari, KDT), whose rise to third-largest bloc in the Diet is nothing short of groundbreaking. On 136 seats, up a full 119 from the end of the last Diet, KDT is now a force to be reckoned with. New party president Tazena Oren Inzar, the so-called “Chief of Oren,” has been nothing short of a charismatic firebrand in her campaign, in which she did not hold back at attacking the Prime Minister, despite her party’s nominal two years of alignment with IV in a confidence-and-supply agreement. Ms. Oren Inzar, 40, is the youngest Delegate of Oren ever elected, and her election returns KDT to its historically leading seat—there have been several Diets where the only KDT delegate was that of Line Oren. KDT saw support increase in the northeast, long its secondary bastion outside Motai Province in the south, but also in places it rarely sees support, such as suburban Nuvo Province and the cosmopolitan southeast coast. Deputy Prime Minister Vakar Nelandri Venat lost his delegacy to a KDT cousin, marking the first time Line Nelandri has been held by a party other than IV or its predecessor Democratic National Party since the Great War.
KDT has not explicitly ruled out a coalition with IV, but Ms. Oren Inzar has laid out conditions Mrs. Nevran Alandar will need to meet that would be a tall order for any Prime Minister to accept: “After years of Žarís delaying and ignoring her promises to us, we are going to demand real commitment to real support for Tavari tradition and culture. Not just lip-service on bringing back the Tavari script maybe in a decade, we need to see the entire Seventh Revision of Modern Standard Tavari immediately reversed, we need to see a restoration of government financial support for the Tavat Avati Shrine Association, a total moratorium on new long-term work permits for foreigners, and we need to see an end to all these free trade agreements and a government that supports Tavari businesses in Tavaris.” The Tavari government has never financially supported the Tavat Avati Shrine Association, which was established in 1944, but the far-right governments of Heroes Alliance in the 1930s, after the Great War, did issue grants to the organisation’s predecessor, the Convocation of Spirit-Speakers—which was only one of the innumerable public controversies during the Heroes Alliance governments. Heroes Alliance, which was known for leaning on armed gangs of young supporters as an intimidation tactic, has long been such a third rail in Tavari politics that even its indirect inference had once been a death knell for any campaign. No longer, it would seem, but even so, it is unlikely that Žarís Nevran Alandar will have any desire to inflame the very inter-religious tensions she has dedicated herself to erasing, and beyond that, it is next to impossible that a former Minister of International Trade and Development will want to undo any free trade agreements any time soon. This is not to mention any of Ms. Oren Inzar’s even more extreme proposals—she is known to have called for the restoration of the Chiefs and a return to “some level” of Chief-based governance, a political stance once held only by the outermost radical fringes, and has also called for the immediate expulsion of all Ayaupian and Banian “non-citizen nationals,” each communities of a few thousand descended from refugees, whose legal status depends on a Supreme Constitutional Court decision that has not been, but could at any time be, revoked by the Diet.
So where do we go from here? By virtue of her status as incumbent Prime Minister, Žarís Nevran Alandar will continue serving in the office in a caretaker capacity, as all Prime Ministers do while the Diet is dissolved, and as leader of the largest faction in the Diet, the rules of the Diet grant her the first shot at conducting negotiations to form the government through chairing the standing Committee on Nominations. These rules give her a maximum of 24 days—on the 25th, unless the Diet votes to suspend the rule, the leader of the Diet’s second largest faction will automatically become chair of the Committee on Nominations. Each “major party” in the Diet (legally defined as parties with 96 or more Delegates) will eventually be granted a shot, in descending order of seat count, unless or until a nomination for Prime Minister is passed by an absolute majority of Diet Delegates, or all major parties fail to pass a nomination, in which case there is one last 24-day period for the smaller parties to make an attempt and, failing that, the Diet is automatically dissolved and a new election called. There is no role for Emperor Otan IV to play in the process except to appoint the eventual nominee or issue the writs for election. There are six major parties in the 68th Diet of the Kingdom of Tavaris, more than ever before, meaning that there could be as many as 168 days, more than 5 months, of politicking to determine who will next lead the Tavari government. At this point very little is certain, except for one thing—uncertainty. Tavaris will, as is the only thing it can do, move onward. Whether it does so together is another question altogether, and one yet unanswered.
SEAT RESULTS
All Lines reporting
- Irínavi Voi! (IV, centrist/unionist): 358 seats (-201)
- The Liberals (VV, conservative): 178 seats (+49)
- Tavari National Party (KDT, nationalist): 136 seats (+119)
- Ítan Ladrena (ÍL, social democrat): 134 seats (-9)
- Labour (or Workers’) Party (KH, democratic socialist): 126 seats (+5)
- Green Tavaris (TE, green): 108 seats (+3)
- Urth (NE, green): 60 seats (+3)
- New Tavari Communist Party (Mõzba, communist): 49 seats (+37)
- No Party Affiliation: 3 seats (-6)