History of Candelaria And Marquez

The Candelarias archipelago has been populated since approximately the 14th century, though until recent times any evidence of pre-European settlement was speculative at best. Spanish and later English-speakers provided the bulk of early colonists on the islands of Marquez and Candelaria respectively, with sovereignty of the islands claimed by the British under Thomas Jennings in the 1830s. Self-government was achieved later in that century and all ties with the crown finally severed in 1947 with the declaration of a new Republic of the Candelarias.

The country suffered a brief but bloody civil war in 1959-60, after which it was founded anew as the Republic of Candelaria And Marquez. Under successive coalition governments headed by either the Unionist or Modern Liberal parties the country experienced moderate economic prosperity, slow but steady social liberalisation and a move towards a multicultural identity driven by increasing non-European immigration and the uneven addressing of grievances among the Hispanic Marquezian population.

Despite a wide cross-party consensus; media censorship and human rights violations by government security agencies charged with maintaining the ‘Candelariasian Conspiracy’ of silence regarding the existence of nonhuman sapience and other denied aspects of the wider multiverse only increased during C&M’s ‘International Era’ in which national and club sports teams and individuals competed with significant success on the worlds stage. The Beatrice Event of 2010 brought an abrupt both to this period and the country’s use of so-called ‘time dilation devices’, and Candelariasian involvement in international politics and sport subsequently largely ceased amid considerable social unrest, though despite significant psychological trauma the country steadily adapted to its new status quo. A process of declassification and the hearings of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission have led to a more open state and overwhelming reduction in media and internet censorship under the current Tan administration.

Prehispanic Candelarias

The details and timeline of the earliest human settlement of the Candelarias archipelago beyond Ransome-Bkyki Island remain hazy and disputed, and very much a new science. For well over a century, the prevailing belief in the Candelarias was that the islands were uninhabited at the time of Spanish colonization, with archaeological evidence that might have indicated otherwise attributed to failed settlement by Bkyka and other indigenous Rushmoris, or trade between European settlers and indigenous peoples of RBI, Branta, the Sargossan islands and beyond.

Since the Monument Place Incident of 2008 and the public hearings that followed the Beatrice Event of 2010 however, it has become widely accepted that the south-eastern coast of Candelaria at least was inhabited by a people calling themselves the Kolan. At what point this race settled the Candelarias, or from where they originally came, remains unclear, with DNA studies inconclusive and confused by a legacy of genetic mixing with a variety of aboriginal Rushmori groups prior to European settlement and, likely to an even greater extent, with European peoples over the following centuries. The academic community is now broadly agreement however that occasional hostilities existed between the Kolan and Spanish settlers from the early eighteenth century, and became more fraught following the more widespread settlement of Candelaria by Anglophone colonists. In a desperate move to escape slaughter, disease and enslavement, much of the Kolan escaped into the now inaccessible pocket dimension referred to in contemporary Candelariasian study as Svartalfheim, in reference to the lifeforms named as svartálfar or sewer goblins by Candelariasians and hokoanama alie by the Kolan.

Knowledge that this aboriginal population had ever existed was gradually lost – and indeed, it seems almost certain, deliberately obfuscated – and the Kolan survived in the Candelariasian collective memory in a folkloric form, as fairy beings inclined towards the theft of human children, blond(e)s in particular. This was not without its basis in reality, for the Kolan continued to make raids upon European settlements from their new extradimensional home, and over time adopted the identity of faeries to the extent that the vast majority of their own population, raised within Svartalfheim, were left unaware that they were as human as the Candelariasians. For many decades, elders and other leaders among the Kolan were secretly influential in the political life of the Candelarias, and were a direct inspiration for, and major upholder of, the Candelariasian Conspiracy, ostensibly for their own protection. It must however be noted that the Truth & Reconciliation hearings in relation to the activities of the M.O.R.T. have strongly indicated that successive Candelariasian governments experienced other pressures, both domestic and overseas, encouraging the maintenance of the populace’s state of ignorance regarding non-human sapience.

European colonization

Though it is generally agreed that English explorers were the first Europeans to discover and chart the islands that would become the Candelarias (initially ‘New Rutland’) in the early eighteenth century, the first attempts at colonization were made by the Spanish – the village of Marquez being one of the first, in 1770 at the latest. As an official venture with state support, the colonization ended abruptly barely two decades later, with the Candelarias not deemed to be tactically important outposts and lacking in resources. New settlers continued to arrive with corporate backing into the 1800s, with Gran Candelaria a less popular choice for settlement than Marquez owing to the difficult terrain and pre-existing British claims. The 1820s however brought a vast influx of English-speaking settlers – until then a barely tolerated minority – and in 1830 the sovereignty of the Candelarias was formally claimed by Britain.

Under Thomas Jennings, the first British-appointed Governor, and his new regime in Brayton, Hispanic immigration was effectively outlawed, though as the clear majority population the denizens of Marquez remained largely left to their own devices. Ill-feeling in those areas where the two major linguistic communities did intermingle however led to increasingly heavy fighting in the 1840s; first in the outlying islands, which saw decisive victories for the English that forced the mass and permanent ejection of Hispanics from the southern islands. Soon after, on Marquez, militias encouraged by fringe sections of the official government frequently took or destroyed entire towns, with El din remaining to the last a rare Hispanic bastion on the island’s west coast.

In the 1860s under Governor William Dawes Robinson the colony gained representative government and soon after self-government under the British crown, with organised Liberal and Conservative parties rapidly developing and Robinson, of the former, becoming the first Premier, and later Prime Minister. Robinson soon ratified a constitution and a series of treaties with Spanish-speaking populations, alongside other linguistic minorities on Marquez, with all the Candelarias’ male residents of European heritage given representation in the nascent parliament and equal rights in the eyes of the law. In practise however, discrimination in regards to political representation, employment, education and other walks of life continued to be a blight on Hispanic Marquezian lives for another century to come, long after the community had been reduced from majority to minority status by the greater emphasis on non-Hispanic immigration.

National Unionism

While the early political battles in the Candelarias parliament centred on the social liberalism and protectionism of Robinson and his fellow Liberal Prime Minister Peter Plummer, and the classical liberalism of the Conservatives and Prime Minister Sir George Nitkin, both parties were inextricably linked with both the trade union and republican movements, such was the support for both among the Candelariasian populace. Both also however advocated the strongest possibly ties with the motherland even during a prolonged depression and widely perceived lack of support from Britain. Candelarians and, most significantly, Hispanic Marquezians began to look towards domestic solutions to their problems.

The communitarian writings of a cadre of Candelarias-based novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians and journalists increasingly began to supply the basis of a new national consciousness, with Reuben Merchant – at various stages all of the above – at its heart. Still revered as a ‘father of the nation’ figure, Merchant’s political and social philosophies, referred to in tandem with those of his closest colleagues as ‘Merchantism’, are today as little regarded in C&M as they were ever beyond Candelariasian shores, but at the time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they had a profound impact on the burgeoning Candelariasian nation. The political movement that became associated with Merchantism, National Unionism, swept Tomer Hague to power in 1885, espousing ideals both related to and distinct from the international socialism blooming across much of the European world.

Hispanic Marquezians and other disadvantaged groups were among the National Unionist Party’s most enthusiastic supporters, though the party’s power structure would remain as dominated by the Anglo elite as its rivals. The party held power from 1885 to 1903 and again from 1904 to 1914, their supremacy during this period such that the Candelarias could be considered all but a one-party state. Hague, Prime Minister for twenty of those years, came to epitomise the Candelariasian state in himself; with his all-consuming emphasis on social solidarity, warmth towards both his political colleagues from the country’s intelligentsia and those from the humblest of background, tolerance towards non-British cultures and rejection of international interventionism and the trappings of Empire – as well as his disinclination towards tolerance of dissent and a support of traditional morality, albeit formally divorced from Christian thinking, in line with Merchant’s agnosticism. It is notable that while women among Hague and Merchant’s social set, such as the novelists Georgina Guillaumin and April Langley and the campaigner Lyra de Jong, were warmly embraced within the movement, women were not granted full suffrage until 1953, and there was never any suggestion of support for such a move within the National Unionist mainstream.

Famously, the extent of the party’s dominance was such that the parliament of 1889 lasted over thirteen years, with the two main opposition parties stymying attempts to hold new elections amid a justly held fear that they would be completely wiped out. An election in 1903 brought a Liberal-Conservative minority coalition briefly to power, before Hague was returned to office as Prime Minister in a House comprising over eighty percent National Unionists. Merchant himself would succeed an aged Hague as Prime Minister but serve only a year prior to his death, and under his unpopular successor Oliver Ryan and his own rapid replacement Jeremiah Sampson the party began to rupture. The growing influence of the far left within the party resulted in a significant split, with a group of backbenchers forming the Conservative Unionist party alongside the Tory rump and, though Sampson retained power in 1909 with Liberal support, his tenure would spell the dramatic end of National Unionist rule.

With social policies far too liberal for the masses to accept, and even the Hagueites and Merchantists of the Candelarias blanching at the degree to which Sampson appeared intent on breaking up traditional concepts of the family, denigrating dominant British culture and fostering close relations with communist nations and movements, there was a further exodus both to the Conservative Unionists and a new Liberal Unionist grouping. Sampson’s reputation as a heavy drinker and womaniser as well as his Catholicism, and overt lack of support for the motherland at a time of rising tensions in Europe, added to a disastrous public image and, in 1914, the Conservative Unionists – initially in coalition, and eventually following a full merger, with the Conservatives – returned the Tories to power for the first time in three decades.

‘Pre-War’ politics

The following decades saw a succession of Liberal Unionist and Conservative Unionist governments largely treading water when it came to nation-shaping, and increasingly reverting to their pre-Hague type. The Great Depression dominated the thirties, during when time the Liberal Unionist PM Oxford Birch emerged as the key figure, re-establishing the modern welfare state that remains a seldom questioned part of Candelarias society and further loosening ties with the country’s colonial masters and increasing them with Rushmori neighbours. Though ousted amid internal strife first as PM and then opposition leader in 1928, among the left-leaning public at large he remained the symbolic figurehead of a popular opposition to a growing ruling oligarchy, and by 1934 had returned to power in a landslide victory – helped by a greater eagerness than any of his predecessors to reach out to the Hispanic community. His cabinet from 1938 included several native Spanish speakers in important roles. Birch put into motion a programme of dramatically increased urbanisation, though his plans were stymied by the Second World War – which the Candelarias never officially entered but during which time was still heavily militarised and with much energies turned to the production of munitions.

Birch’s handling of the war effort much criticized; in 1943 the Conservative Unionists returned to power under Mullen Irving. While a fine administrator, Irving’s social policies were deeply divisive – abortion and divorce were made illegal, while restrictions on alcohol and tobacco sales were loosened. Virulently anti-Hispanic, Irving declined to pay lip-service to the Spanish language and promoted segregation on Marquez. Having little time for other new immigrant groups he began a process of internment of recent Italian and German arrivals, alongside others often spuriously labelled as possessing Axis sympathies. In 1947 the Conservative Unionists suffered a massive electoral defeat by the opposition under Samuel Padovani, his Liberal Unionists having largely absorbed what remained of the National Unionists.

A central plank of Padovani’s electoral campaign had been the declaration of full independence and the creation of the Republic of the Candelarias, ultimately declared on the fourteenth of April 1948, on the feast day of the islands’ unofficial patron saint, Peter Gonzalez. More fiscally conservative than during the Birch years, the new government attempted to restore a sense of private enterprise lost during his tenure and the years of war-time nationalisation. Birch’s failure to follow through on his aims had left the country facing major rural and inner-city poverty and, following Padovani’s sudden death, his successor Sidney Ferguson made public sympathy towards the plight of the country’s poor the cornerstone of his public persona – despite a private conviction that their problems were largely of their own making, blighted by alcoholism and family breakdown.

McManus

In the early years of Candelariasian government, the ideas of Merchantism and the Working Man’s Republic were so firmly entrenched into the national psyche and politics that extreme left movements with a less parochial flavour struggled to take hold. The relative lack of socio-economic disparity between ordinary Candelarian workers and the country’s intellectual elite meant that a high degree of respect for the dominant parties remained in place, and despite regularly winning seats in the House, entities such as the Socialist Labour Party and the Alliance of Candelarias Communists failed to threaten the dominance of the big two before and after the rise and fall of the National Unionists.

In 1949 however, a new Socialist Party emerged and rapidly became an electoral force. For the first time, a mass of working people – and those who merely aspired to be – found a voice in a Marxist-Leninist movement over a home-grown Merchantist one, with the Liberal Unionist hegemony challenged from the left who believed Ferguson and later PM Percival Dolezal’s reforms inadequate and a right who viewed them as excessive. The Socialists’ heartland was in the cities and industrial towns, but under James McManus they found a powerful leader who won support from across the country – including from within the Red Tory faction of a declining Conservative Unionist party.

The LUs meanwhile seemed intent on political suicide. In early 1954 documents were leaked to the country’s major newspapers revealing the details of what had been a secret, failed coup orchestrated by Ferguson five years earlier to oust the far-left government of Ransome-Bkyki Island. Such an act clearly went against the spirit of the Republic’s constitutional barring foreign intervention and he was forced to resign. His rather more popular deputy Dolezal succeeded him, but his government was soon embroiled with a series of scandals as the country’s burgeoning mass media took the opportunity to sink their teeth into the squalor of traditional politics. In 1956 the Socialists won the election by a comfortable margin, supported by the Conservative Unionists who had reinvented themselves as the party of the countryside, promoting agrarian reform.

McManus immediately made good on many of his electoral promises, the country’s mixed economy rapidly altered beyond recognition with even the most minor industries coming under direct government control. Limited collectivisation of the suburban middle-class followed amid a vast programme of agricultural reform, and laws were passed to limit media criticism. High-ranking figures across Candelarias society who displeased him, including within the armed forced, were rapidly disposed of. At the same time, a number of women were given important cabinet posts for the first time, and a generation of housewives were suddenly encouraged to take jobs and roles outside the home – it had been under Socialist pressure that full female suffrage had earlier been passed.

This shock to the Candelariasian economy was actually briefly beneficial, but any surge in prosperity was as short-lived as it was built on increasing abuses. McManus’ lack of practical interest in either his fellow MP’s Marxist-Leninist convictions or the residual Merchantism of his coalition partners – preferring as he did to espouse his own ideas and ideals than worry about the wishes of others – cost him many friends within the government, many of whom were sacked or chose to resign in late 1957. Only later did it become public knowledge that several of the latter group had been poisoned or had their lives and loved ones threatened. An early 1958 by-election in a Liberal Unionist safe seat in Arrigo resulted in a heavy Socialist victory, and buoyed by this support McManus dissolved parliament and ordered new elections. By the slighted of margins his party was defeated, the opposition taking power under Percy Garrard.

Garrard was Prime Minister in name only however, the Socialists and their CU allies maintaining power in local councils and declining to pay attention to the change in administration. McManus supporters had been so effectively planted in the country’s major companies, media outlets and the armed forces that Garrard proved able to achieve little – despite the Liberal Unionists’ victory being celebrated almost as a revolution in itself across much of the country. Divided like never before, millions of Candelariasians remained loyal to McManus and less than a year after the election Garrard returned to the country in the hope of ousting the bulk of the Socialists from their positions across all layers of society. Instead, amid widespread electoral fraud by both sides, the Socialists narrowly regained power.

The Civil War

Part of the problem had been the splitting of votes in the areas of the country worst afflicted by McManus’ economic policies, particularly in Hispanic Marquez. Days after his re-election an alliance of Hispanic parties on Marquez declared unilateral independence as the Republic of Marquez, with Gustavo Higa becoming the new state’s titular ruler. McManus initially took a firm hand against the rebellion, and attempted to whip-up Marquez’ English-speaking population into supporting his government. For a short time it appeared as though this would be successful, as Marquez descended into ethnic conflict and the Higa government’s base of operations in El din was torn down with several of his ministers killed.

The Party for a Free Marquez was established in June 1959 however, co-led by Albert Fernández and the Arrigo-born former LU Senate leader Robert Lewis. FM soon corralled much of the island’s population, both Hispanic and Anglo, into guerrilla action against the Albrecht government and in support of Higa’s in El din. McManus in response ordered the bombing of Arrigo and La Basilica, but attempts to control Marquez soon proved futile as Sargossa and several other Rushmori states recognised the new Republic and threatened the Candelarian government with retaliatory measures if it continued its campaign. Most of the conservatively minded outlying islands also took the opportunity to declare independence, and though the army attempted to retake Green Island they were soon withdrawn back to Candelaria where the island was itself rapidly dissolving into civil war.

As a conflict between armed groups loyal to the government and opposition, the war itself peaked in the autumn and winter of 1959-60, as ever-increasing numbers of Candelarian people, and members of McManus’ vast armed forces, turned against him and in favour of the rebellion. Such moves were initially put down ferociously in Lesperance, Dyce, Abiodun and other small cities, whilst Arrigo continued to suffer weeks of bombing while the islands-wide opposition under former PM Dolezal remained based there at Higa’s reluctant request.

In early November 1959 around a third of the Candelarian army suddenly switched their support to the opposition and the following month saw the bloodiest fighting of the conflict as the country’s armed forces fought amongst themselves. In late December the rebellion captured Albrecht, forcing McManus and his officials to flee Robinson House and base the government in Khatib. From this point on his practical control of the country was over, but he could still count on the support of at least half the Candelarian army, who still considered his the rightful, democratically-elected government, and large swathes of the populace in the north-east. Media manipulation was still successfully convincing many hundreds of thousands that their brethren in the south were now under the iron fist of a despotic regime, while all the time rebellion forces were being lauded instead as liberators. McManus’ army continued to be pushed north, committing many of the worst atrocities of the conflict as they did so. The Starless City Massacre is the most well-remembered, as many hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered in the space of a few hours.

The Socialists received a fillip when several small countries, both in Rushmore and beyond, were enticed to enter the conflict on their side, but the first troops to arrive in north-east Candelaria were volunteers from dozens of nations attracted to fight against what they believed were fascist forces, and they too soon discovered the reality of the situation.

With the help of munitions from Rushmori allies, the opposition had essentially downed the Candelarian air force by early February 1960. Large numbers of soldiers defected once more, while others fled the country. Attempted landings in the north of Candelaria were successfully repelled and the rebellion was able to moved further north. Crucially, the Socialists’ domination of the airwaves was finally ended in early March, and millions of Candelarians were able to receive an alternative view of the conflict for the first time. The mood in the north-eastern Candelarian cities began to turn against McManus, though this was far from unanimous and fighting between citizens broke out within most north-eastern cities’ streets.

On April fourteenth – the country’s national day – McManus, his chancellor and two army heads were shot dead by the long-time agriculture minister, Rudolf Janekovic, who then turned the gun on himself, having killed his wife and children earlier in the day before arriving at the Party’s national day celebratory drinks. McManus’ recently installed Foreign Minister, Leo Dunphy, took the reins of power and immediately declared an unconditional surrender.

The Clarke years

Amid collapse of first the Higa and then Santiago Salomón’s governments in Marquez and further pressure from home and abroad to reunite the shattered country, a Government of National Reconciliation was soon convened in Bove. Dolezal’s entreaties to the various administrations of the outlying islands to see them recognise his interim government failed, with the leadership of Green Island et al unwilling to support an administration including former Socialist MPs, and more than one penitent former member of McManus’ inner circle, and as a result a new Republic of Candelaria And Marquez was hastily pronounced. Only from 1972 did all the Outliers bar Cabrera Island again return MPs to the Albrecht parliament.

For the first time a President was declared – Kjell Olousson III, grandson of a prominent National Unionist figure, but the real power behind Olousson and his politically diverse cabinet was David Clarke. A former Socialist MP, he achieved notoriety as the first to defect to the Liberal Unionists, before even McManus had won the 1956 elections, in protest at the party’s “dark, hidden, heart.” Initially given the thorny Housing brief in the reconciliation government, Clarke excelled as an administrator and an orator. Less than a year later, as Finance Secretary, he put into place the Clarkeist economics that would dominate C&M for the next two decades.

Clarke’s unashamedly leftist views were seen as a tonic in an administration that could have all too easily swung far to the right following the atrocities of the McManus regime. Whilst retaining the bones of the welfare state and the nationalised public services, he was prepared to trust C&M’s economic viability to a small handful of businessmen, most of whom had lost their companies during the McManus era. In this, and his autocratic style, Clarke’s critics have argued that only chance and the good work of rival MPs stopped him becoming another McManus. His defenders would argue that he always had the advantage of not being stark raving mad.

With the ill-health of Olousson, Clarke was appointed Vice-President at the behest of his party leader George Vaughan. With Olousson’s resignation in May 1962 Clarke became President and had little choice but to install Vaughan as Prime Minister and the head of government. Relations between the pair and their supporters deteriorated rapidly and before the year was out the LU had split for good – principally over the issue of Marquezian autonomy – to which Clarke was strenuously opposed. It was partly in an effort to avoid the entirety of Marquez’ Hispanic population falling into the hands of ethnocentric separatist parties that Vaughan’s LU merged with what was left of the old Liberal party to form the Liberals anew, dropping the ‘Unionist’ from their name. This act was portrayed by Clarke supporters as a slight against the Merchantist Unionists of old, and they gleefully pronounced themselves simply as the Unionists.

In 1964, Clarke won the first public Presidential vote, narrowly ahead of his Liberal challenger Bradford Bule and the Conservative Konstantin Boldin. More unexpected was that the Clarke Unionists won eighty-seven parliamentary seats, comfortably ahead of the Liberals’ sixty, with Clarke himself ousting George Vaughan from his Bove seat – an act compliant with the letter of the new constitution, if not the sprit. Effectively then, Clarke was now both President and Prime Minister, and though he renounced the latter title to his deputy Isaac Julian there was now no argument as to who was in charge of the country. These elections did however show just how divided the country was – the Socialists under George Beccara still taking seats in the north-east, the People’s Movement (essentially the Conservative Unionists) likewise in the west. Hispanic nationalists dominated the Marquez vote, with multiple different parties elected.

Clarke formed a deeply uneasy national coalition with the Liberals under Harold O’Donnell and began a decade of political domination. His ability to plough his own furrow while appearing to placate the broad spectrum of society was masterful. Though a social conservative, he was keen to emphasise individual initiative both in citizens’ economic and social lives, and relaxed laws governing the sale of alcohol and the availability of divorce. To a greater degree than any of his predecessors he reached out to Marquez’s Hispanics and took huge steps towards ending the formalised discrimination against them. At the same time, he encouraged the migration of English-speaking Candelarians to the second island, hoping to avoid Anglo Marquezians becoming a beleaguered minority in the event of a second declaration of independence.

That move helped improve Marquez economically but left Candelarias with a worker shortage, which Clarke attempted to rectify by opening the country’s doors to mass immigration, particularly that of a non-European background. The sudden arrival of many thousands of non-white settlers threatened to split society once again, particularly in the inner-cities where, partly in an effort to disconnect themselves from the Civil War-era party’s policies, the Socialists under Beccara took a moderately anti-immigrant stance. Yet with the help of much of the popular press, Clarke was able to convince much of the country that this move reflected the best of the Candelarias’ past as well as C&M’s future, and invested heavily in programmes to integrate the new arrivals.

Another key part of Clarke’s success was continuing McManus policies in regards to women, helping to lay the table for the sexual revolution of the seventies and boost C&M’s struggling economy with thousands of new, highly motivated female workers. He also declined to respond to pressure to shut down many of the more dilapidated mines as well as shift any focus away from the country’s agricultural base. A modest space programme even took flight – C&M’s first, and as it would prove only, scientific satellite, Beatrice, launched in 1971.

He was certainly also helped by the failures of the country’s other major parties however, with the Conservatives still slowly getting back in the swing of things and George Beccara’s Socialists finding the transition back into a mainstream party for the working man something of a struggle. In a worse state were the Liberals meanwhile, who were being torn apart by a morass of ideologies while their former colleagues in the Unionist Party appeared more united behind Clarke every day. In late 1967 the party split; with Jack Engebo, a charismatic, slightly unstable individual who described himself as an anarcho-capitalist becoming the leader of the Modern Liberal Party. The public quickly saw through what was in reality a clash of personalities within the decrepit old Liberal party, and polls suggested that Clarke’s Unionists were on course for a huge victory in 1968. With his iconic straw boater and pipe, Clarke was the centre of a political personality cult that arguably went beyond anything McManus or perhaps even Merchant had achieved.

The President’s gravest error in his tenure however came early that year following the Gordon Bay disaster and criticisms over a failure to keep the public adequately informed of the ensuing situation. The venerable old Conservative party under Oliver Lapansky took the opportunity to criticise the vast reduction in defence spending, a move which gained support among Candelariasians keen to see the protection of C&M’s Armed Defence Forces become an issue for the right once more. In a fit of paranoia, Clarke opted to suspend the Presidential elections fearing that the hard-line right-winger Robert Keith, whose views on the future direction of the Candelariasian workforce were as dramatic as his bible-thumping, would snatch the Presidency. It was for this reason that, until the reforms of the 2010s abolished the position, the office of Prime Minister was long sinecure, and that of President of the Government usually held by the leader of the largest party in the House or governing coalition.

The Unionists did win the ’68 House elections ahead of the Conservatives, Senate Leader John Leon appointed Clarke President once more, and with Isaac Julian reinstalled as his titular PM he set about establishing a coalition with what remained of the original Liberals and Beccara’s Socialists. The latter decision was a masterstroke. Though still the fourth party in the House, the Socialists had increased their seats to thirty-one and were beginning to become an acceptable political entity beyond the north-east of Candelaria. Now, as part of the government, they were hamstrung by their relationship with Clarke, and individuals such as Beccara found it impossible to throw about references to ‘cultural hegemony’ and ‘bourgeois constructs’ and preach the need for revolution convincingly. No less importantly it helped keep much of the working class on side, particularly the miners and heavy-goods manufacturers, who felt that their voice in government was intact.

Beccara’s death in 1971 prompted the Socialists to take a new look at themselves, and the polls, and realise that the country’s inner-city workers were increasingly regarding the Unionists as ‘their’ party. Meanwhile, a large number of far-left parties had developed anew, but their lack of success in local council and Senate elections suggested that the Candelarias had lost any residual appetite for such political philosophies. While many MPs still continued to proclaim their Marxist credentials, the party officially became the Social Democrats, and to the present day the trappings of international leftist identity are viewed not so much with distaste as disinterest, despite a commitment to statist economics that would last until the fall of the Conspiracy.

The Modern Liberals

C&M did get a minor revolution in 1972 however, when the Modern Liberals under Michael Allen suddenly sprung into power. Having divested themselves of Engebo, the MLP appeared as fresh as the Unionists had a decade earlier, and soon took the Unionists’ place as the party for women (or at least of middle-class women), while campaigning in favour of finally abolishing the death penalty (though in practise the last such had occurred in 1964 with the execution of McManus’ information minister Thibault Benchabane), legalising homosexuality and licensed prostitution, taking a new look at anti-drug laws, vastly dropping taxes and promoting private enterprise. Compared to the Christian Socialist moralising of Clarke’s successor as Unionist leader, Stanley Wyatt, it was the MLP that suddenly seemed to represent the future. In promising improved regulation of large corporations meanwhile, and making particular under-fire industries a central plank of their campaign, they also succeeded in gaining portions of the working-class vote who felt betrayed by Clarke’s failure to punish some of his cronies in charge of big industry.

The MLP’s victory was by just five seats. The Unionists lost twenty, though much of the MLP’s success was at the expense of the new SDP, who were reduced to fourteen, just two more than Carlos Tranter’s Free Marquez. The SDP reacted by appointing the first Hispanic leader of any party based outside of Marquez, Andrés Carraro, but he proved ineffectual and was gone within a year.

Having doubled their number of seats, the MLP were mildly surprised to find themselves in power and their honeymoon period was over very quickly. Opting to form a minority administration alongside the right-wing Islands & Country Party their social reforms were instantly hamstrung. With SDP, and a certain amount of Unionist, support they were able to push through the legalisation of homosexuality and the abolition of the death penalty, but soon found that the public enthusiasm for some of their other proposed reforms had rapidly waned. In mid-1973 the Senate swung heavily in favour of the Conservatives, with Lemuel Shishelov becoming Senate Leader and stopping MLP bills at every opportunity.

In days of old, Allen would surely have opted to call for new elections, or been effectively forced to do so, but the Second Republic possessed four-year fixed terms, leaving the President’s administration in danger of becoming a three-year lame duck. As 1973 ploughed on however it became clear that the economy would become the government’s focus once more. Britain’s ascension to the EEC, and the sudden and vast expansion in the agricultural output of other major Rushmori nations with the introduction of new mass-production technologies led C&M’s agriculturally-based economy to collapse in the space of a few weeks. Huge expanses of west Candelaria and north-east Marquez were left as wildernesses as farmworkers flocked to the cities in search of work that couldn’t be found. The government attempted to stimulate industrial growth as best they could, encouraging international corporations to set up factories in C&M specialising motor vehicles and electronic goods.

Allen died suddenly following a stroke in early 1975 and the MLP elected his long-time friend, and more recently Prime Minister, Michael Osborn as party leader. It was a further two months however until the Conservative-controlled Senate agreed to permit Osborn to become President, and after his ascension he quickly attempted to make unravelling the clear constitutional errors at the heart of C&M’s political system a major plank of his first year in office. To do this he was forced to bring the House’s forty-six Conservative MPs into the governing coalition, but instead found his way blocked by the Unionists in both chambers. Osborn’s tenure was then further interrupted by the Lussolavizzovian conflict, which saw the C&M President rather reluctantly take centre stage in peace negotiations.

Osborn was fortunate to be the sitting President ahead of a 1976 election where public trust in all the main parties had slipped to a new low. The Conservatives – who at one point early in ’76 had been leading the polls – had suffered badly after their finance spokesman was found guilty of murdering his wife, and a series of sleaze stories in the popular press that made a mockery of their family-values image. The new Unionist leader Eddie Self failed to get the all-important nod from David Clarke, still a looming figure in Candelariasian politics, while the public were still far from willing to trust the SDP, despite the presence as leader of the popular newspaper columnist and sportswriter) Charles McLay.

Most importantly, it was clear that that of the big five parties (with Free Marquez still included in that number) only the Conservatives offered a different approach to C&M’s economic slump. The general consensus was that Osborn warranted another shot at the job, and amidst the lowest turnout for decades the MLP increased their majority over the Unionists to twenty-five seats. Osborn immediately established a coalition with the Conservatives and Islands & Country, and encouraged the Senate to select long-time Tory leader Oliver Lapansky as the Senate Leader despite the MLP now having the balance of power in that chamber too. Free of foreign policy issues, Osborn proceeded to hold his nose and reduce government spending, cut taxes, remove industry subsidies and generally attempted to make C&M as business-friendly as possible without challenging the country’s commitment to the welfare state and notions of social solidarity.

More popularly, Osborn struck a more socially conservative tone than had been expected, focusing on the ‘scourge’ of alcoholism and C&M’s early experiences with inner-city drug abuse, though at the same time his government reduced restrictions on gambling and put into place the groundwork for the gambling revolution of the late ‘80s. It was Osborn’s social policies that caused the greatest ructions within the MLP’s Tory colleagues, with a distinct libertarian faction under Charman Durham beginning to gain influence both within the party and nationally. Durham challenged and replaced Norman Allen (no relation) as Conservative leader, and suddenly C&M seemed ready for a massive ideological shift at the heart of its politics.

The final months of the Osborn premiership however came to be taken up by three key issues: Firstly, unemployment; which was if anything worsening under Osborn despite a general increase in prosperity. Secondly, the plight of the country’s urban poor (and by now the rural poor had all but ceased to exist in the sweeping migration to the Strip), particularly those in Marquez. Marquez in general became the key focus of the country’s media in fact, with the increased availability of television bringing the living conditions of the shanty towns surrounding El din and the backwater villages of the north-east into Candelarian living rooms.

Not coincidentally, in March ’76 twenty-three people, mostly local government officials, were killed in a bombing in the Marquezian capital. The true culprits would remain forever elusive but the nationalist Acción Delantera group, who had previously claimed responsibility for a series of more minor incidents across the islands in previous years, were widely blamed. Days afterwards a leading medical scientist was murdered, with the AD this time proudly proclaiming accountability for ending the life of a key member of a then little-known organisation called the National Eugenics Council. In the weeks that followed, the Candelariasian public watched horrified as details of the NEC’s actions over recent years began to dominate the news, while Hispanic Marquezians reacted with anger to the knowledge that what had previously been dismissed as isolated incidents and exaggerated stories turned out to be part of a comprehensive, decades-long plot to stem the reproductive flow of their community. After sitting on his hands for days amid violent protests across the Candelarias’ second island, Osborn finally relented to pressure from within his own administration and sent in the troops in an effort to calm the situation. The Anglophone part of the country meanwhile was left utterly divided on the appropriate course of action, with sympathy for the protesters high but tempered by a general sentiment that Hispanic violence – organised or otherwise – had to be dealt with somehow.

Unionists return

From the midst of all this, the Unionists brought forth Erin Henry ‘Harry’ Kyle. Perhaps a soothing, cod-Northlandish brogue was just what was needed, and the Irish Street native’s earnest, conciliatory tone found many friends across the islands in a few short weeks. Kyle seemed steadfast and resolute without resorting to the posturing of the MLP Home Secretary Norman Archer. He reached out to the Spanish-speakers in a way Durham and McLay, the Tory and SDP leaders, could not; promising a full and public investigation into the truth behind the NEC. In rousing speeches, he promised to ‘tax the wealthy to within an inch of their lives’ and make a commitment to human dignity, crossing all lines of wealth and background, the single driving tenet of his administration. As the frail David Clarke looked on, applauding, Kyle seemed to embody the spirit of Candelariasian social solidarity in a way that neither the confused ideals of the MLP and Conservatives, nor the revolutionary spiel of the SDP, could hope to match.

The Unionists duly picked up ninety-seven seats – more even than Clarke at his pomp – and Harry Kyle found himself in Robinson House. Kyle immediately announced a coalition – by now effectively unavoidable thanks to the country’s political system – involving both the SDP and Free Marquez in government for the first time, with FM leader Joaquin Montéz appointed Foreign Secretary, alongside three of the unprecedented ten independent MPs.

Kyle’s earliest months saw the government enjoy unmatched levels of support, with the President’s tough, but honest, sympathetic and jovial, stance making him one of the most popular Candelariasian leaders of all time. Kyle left most of the government’s economic policy to his Finance Secretary, Matthew Fenby, who enacted the re-nationalisation of key industries while attempting to support the growth of small businesses, particularly in the service sector. C&M never became the nation of shopkeepers that Fenby probably envisaged, but it was his time at the Chancery, rather more than his predecessors of the Allen and Osborn eras, that laid the groundwork for the country’s improved economic status of later decades.

Kyle himself came from engineering stock, and he had little emotion towards C&M’s struggling agricultural and mining industries. Moreover, he saw that was Rushmore was really after was finished products – or at least components thereof, and quickly began to encourage the development of state-owned companies specialising in automobile manufacturing and the production of electronics and precision equipment – many of which, though since sold off, remain important employers today. Mines across the country were scaled down, or shut down altogether, with former miners encouraged to find work in construction, or fishing. Farmers were encouraged to switch back to livestock rearing, despite the rapid growth in vegetarianism in C&M, to meet the demand from elsewhere in the region, with others given grants to switch to produce otherwise in short supply in Rushmore, such as potatoes, grapes and sunflower oil.

For the first time in almost a century, C&M became a great trading nation once more, both importing and exporting goods in record numbers. What C&M still lacked was the individual initiative, and economic freedoms, for small companies to go it alone and multinationals to invest in the Candelarias, with the islands’ prosperity all but entirely in the hands of Kyle and Fenby. Socially, Kyle continued to preach against substance abuse, but he also led other awareness campaigns, and for the first time national level government began to take the issue of domestic violence and sexual abuse seriously. The long-ignored plight of the rural poor came to the fore, with Kyle investing expensively on improved transport links and education in the west of Candelaria and the outlying islands.

Cheap cars, both those produced in C&M and abroad, make their way back onto the country’s often dangerous roads, encouraging the rapid growth of relatively prosperous suburbs while the numbers of shanty-town dwellers began to decrease. It was an odd time to be a Candelariasian, completely at the mercy of the decisions of the Kyle-Fenby axis. Whether this relative prosperity was sustainable became the key issue of discussion at the time, alongside whether the country as a whole was truly benefiting. For many, life was dirtier, noisier, smellier and more hurried than it had ever been, and the rewards often seemed scant. Despite Kyle’s best efforts, relations with continental Rushmori nations were not always easy, with trade links frequently blocked and C&M left with serious shortages and surpluses alike.

The early ‘80s also saw an increase in the actions of insurgent groups, including Acción Delantera. Others, frequently with a hard-left outlook, also came to prominence even in cities not formerly associated with such extreme views, while the increasing flow of non-white immigrants to the islands saw far-right movements take hold both in areas of the highest ethnic diversity and the lowest. Though the numbers of people murdered by extreme ideological and nationalist groups were relatively tiny – certainly compared to the lives lost on the country’s roads and in industrial accidents – their generally minor acts of terrorism combined to form a general sense of foreboding. At the same time, the early 80s proved the birthing ground of a renaissance in Candelariasian popular music and spewed out a panoply of home-grown youth movements, who possessed a widely varying degree of trust for Kyle’s new C&M.

Yet in the long term, the President will be perhaps unfairly remembered for his final few months in government, in which he became increasingly authoritarian in style – and arguably slightly deranged. The most physically obvious symbols of this remain Kyle’s Follies, a series of towers built in Albrecht that would form the basis of a system defending the capital against aerial attack and extreme weather conditions, but Kyle also attempted to implement numerous increasingly unbalanced proposals, at one point appointed an imaginary alien called Geoffrey to his cabinet.

Whether the President had merely let power go to his head, was genuinely suffering from some form of mental illness, or engaging in some grand form of performance art, remains a matter for debate, since Kyle spent his final years as a near recluse. Certainly however by late 1983 it was clear he had to go, and the Unionists summoned up the Housing minister George Nicholls to challenge him for party leadership. Nicholls duly won at a canter, but Kyle declined to resign, changing his party allegiance instead to the Independent Harry Kyle Party, of which he was one of three members. The IHKP found it impossible to govern effectively however, given that they had only two ministers besides the President, and C&M was for all intents and purposes ungoverned during his presidency’s remaining four months. Matthew Fenby, as Finance (and Foreign, and Home) Secretary, was left as the one man standing in the way of an impending economic collapse.

The 1984 election was the most eagerly awaited for years and was always going to be one of the closest. During the Kyle era the Conservatives had switched to old Abraham May-Colley, who represented the far more traditionalist sector of the Tory vote; while the MLP had plumped for the rather more dashing figure of Ian O’Reilly, a former Conservative MP and supporter of Charman Durham, who believed in a complete loosening of all barriers on trade and enterprise as well as supporting the unfettered rights of the individual. Behind his back however, former leader Norman Archer still wielded significant influence and shortly before the election he agreed a deal with Nicholls to form a coalition government in the event of a Unionist victory, or Archer being able to oust O’Reilly as party leader before he took power had the MLP themselves won out.

The final result of the contest was not confirmed until days after the May 12th election day, with many seats requiring several recounts. In the final reckoning, the Unionists under Nicholls surprised everyone by ‘retaining’ power; taking seventy-one seats to the MLP’s seventy and the Conservatives’ sixty-three. The SDP lost one seat to thirty-two while, for the first time, the Partido Nacionalista de Marquez earned more seats than Free Marquez, eight versus seven.

Nicholls took the Presidency under the surname of his birth, Nikolov, and duly appointed Archer as his Prime Minister. The relative boom of the Kyle presidency was destined to slip away, and C&M found itself in a world of endless union strikes, three-day weeks, intermittent power supplies and, starting from 1987, hyperinflation. Unemployment continued to rise, while Nikolov lost a generation of Unionist supporters following extensive privatisation.

With regular rebellions from both Unionist and MLP MPs and the significant numbers of Conservatives in the House, passing through progressive social legislation became nigh-on impossible. The government attempted to cope with the spiralling rise of the black market by legalising aspects of the informal economy, but C&M remained mired in a bog from which there seemed no realistic escape.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the four years of the Nikolov presidency also saw arguably the greatest comic and creative output in the country’s history as well as some of the highest levels of criminality for many years. Equally, it was a time in which a quiet little war over the future of Candelariasian morality and ‘traditional values’ was being fought, particularly over the role of women in society, with divorce and marriage rates lowering and rising respectively while at the same time there occurred a new proliferation of lap-dancing clubs and similar establishments.

It was over this issue that Xavier Hrehoresin, the young MLP MP and junior culture minister, began to make his name in late 1986. An establishment liberal through to his bones, Hrehoresin quickly became the favourite politician for slightly over 50% of the population with his constant campaigns against businesses and industries that were seen as demeaning to women, including speaking out against the wishes of many of his party colleagues and the more libertarian half of the Conservatives to legalise prostitution. This was certainly no traditionalist crusade, for Hrehoresin was also keen to get more women into work and encourage the concept of the independently-minded ‘career woman’.

From this beginning he began to develop a platform based around economic re-invigoration as the means to end C&M’s present malaise. His proposals certainly went against the Candelariasian peoples’ natural inclinations, with all his talk of the power of liberal free-trade, but as a symbol he represented something very different from the grey old figures dominating C&M politics. Following a comfortable win in the MLP leadership elections in early 1988 he then found himself up against yet another new Unionist candidate, the Northlandish-born Farrell Reid, a former contemporary of Kyle’s in Albrecht local politics. Though portrayed by much of the media as representing a retrograde step, Reid had his supporters and the contest between the pair was fierce, especially with the SDP’s failure to expand beyond their standard support base. Come the election however, it was no contest. The MLP picked up one hundred and thirteen seats, a number not matched since Birch’s LUs in 1924; principally at the expense of the Conservatives who lost thirty. The Unionists lost just six, but Reid was prepared to admit defeat in record time.

President Hrehoresin

Hrehoresin quickly formed a no-nonsense partnership with the Tories and set about producing the new Candelaria And Marquez. He immediately ordered the revaluing of the currency, creating the Reformed Pound as it is today, and began a programme of major macroeconomic restructuring. Hrehoresin proved unafraid to build on his predecessors’ successes, capitalising on the greater political and economic integration with Rushmore championed by Kyle and Nikolov to develop the Candelarias as a tourist destination, encourage further foreign investment in Candelariasian businesses, and tie C&M’s economy indelibly into Rushmore.

The new President was not without his critics even from within his own parliamentary party, but the massive economic growth that took off almost overnight could hardly be argued with. Moral conservatives within the government had real difficulties in knowing quite how do deal with the country changing around them. The heavy new taxation and regulation on lap dancing establishments, pornography outlets and the like was clearly a Good Thing, while Hrehoresin was happy to encourage the use of restorative justice as well as backing a vast increase in the number of prisons and providing new educational grants to bright children from impoverished backgrounds. Yet at the same time, his decision to reopen many of the old mines – and begin a tentative programme of uranium mining – unnerved many, especially when coupled with new, lax licensing laws on gambling and the beginnings of a real arms industry.

Manufacturing for export became the order of the day; and Hrehoresin, as well as fostering an atmosphere where anyone with a half-decent idea and a bit of get-up-and-go could make buckets of cash, showed an uncanny ability to back a winner. He handed out grants to his favourite businesses and individuals, allowing the Morales Automobile Company to join the venerable Patton-Carmichael as a key employer and exporter of small, cheap vehicles. Likewise, the President foresaw the growth of the nascent IT industry, and encouraged previously unprofitable companies both from home and abroad to pour millions into development on Candelariasian shores. Parliamentary reform had been another important plank of Hrehoresin’s campaign and in early 1990 an all-party commission delivered its findings, to the effect that modern C&M would be best served by the introduction of proportional representation, alongside the retention of sixty regional constituencies. These recommendations were duly implemented ahead of the 1992 elections.

Hrehoresin’s glacial march towards a second term was interrupted by the collapse of a major bank and a sudden announcement of strike action by shipbuilders with the support of John van den Heuvel’s Unionist Party. The attempts by the party of Clarke to position themselves firmly as the party of the poor didn’t entirely fly however, with the poorest class in Candelariasian society remaining divided (particularly given the large Hispanic segment of it), while the middle class hadn’t been so comfortable for many years. Late hiccoughs aside, the effects of the ‘Candelariasian Miracle’ gave Hrehoresin 38% of the so-called ‘Presidential Vote’, while the MLP won over half of the new regional constituencies.

The return of ethnically-charged Hispanic politics was also clear from the ’92 election, with the PNM under Rául Montano picking up seventeen seats. Free Marquez also doubled their representation to ten, but this time they were led by the Anglo Kevin Diallo, his election marking the beginning of the FM’s period of Anglicization. The low threshold for representation also meant that the Workers’ Party, Social Republic Party and Green Party found themselves in the first chamber: not that the latter of the trio were House virgins. In early 1989 four SDP MPs, led by former leader Nigel Vyne, split from the party. Vyne’s leadership had been characterised by an effort to promote the traditional Candelariasian conservatism once espoused by the Liberal Unionists – a commitment to the mixed economy, welfare state, progressive taxation and a progressive social policy qualified by a cautious attitude towards issues such as abortion, the concept of the family et al. Vyne’s SDP had failed to make the expected gains in 1988 however, instead losing five seats, and the young Arrigo native was quickly dismissed as leader in favour of the blood-and-thunder socialist Marcus Quirk.

To some degree the SDP did well in the ’92 election, polling a little over eleven percent of the Presidential Vote but, more, notably, winning ten regional constituencies – and not only in north-east Candelaria. But Quirk’s style of leadership continued to prove highly unpopular, and there remained concerns over the Unionists’ repositioning in traditional SDP territory. Plans by MPs from the right of the party to force Quirk out gathered apace, and their target was Vyne. Though the Green Party had failed to take any of the sixty constituency seats, and polled enough in the PV only for their ageing leader, Patrick Seykouk, to take a seat, Vyne remained an impressive figure in national-level politics. The early nineties was characterised, particularly among the new middle class, by a growing concern for environmental issues – both those of global importance and anxieties over the decline of the country’s natural environment and urban landscape. With a brief that ranged from climate range to littering, the Greens had made major inroads into local politics, even controlling city and regional councils across the country. By 1994, Seykouk had been encouraged by Vyne and his other unrepresented colleagues to formally join forces with the SDP, now led by Joe Studen, as the Social Democratic & Green Party, or SD&GP.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives were also in a state of flux. Though Vernon Hale had polled over fifteen percent of the PV, giving the Tories thirty-one seats, they had won just one constituency seat, in their heartland of mid-north Candelaria. Change was clearly required, but their part in Hrehoresin’s governing coalition made this difficult. The compromise choice was Kenneth Barnicoat, who attempted to keep infighting between the Red Tory and libertarian factions at a minimum and refocus the party around the common issues of strengthening the military, limiting integration into and immigration from Rushmore, creating a strong police force and judiciary not hamstrung by the emerging concept of ‘political correctness’ and supporting efforts towards democratic reform. Barnicoat also attempted to portray his Tories as the ethical voice on the government’s shoulder.

Ethics in general was becoming a key concern in Candelariasian politics. The accumulation of massive wealth by a small group of individuals wasn’t going down well with left and right alike, despite the general prosperity across much of the country. Similarly, the arms industry and uranium mining prospering under Hrehoresin seemed distinctly un-Candelariasian; there were regular reports of corruption at the highest end of big businesses and the rapid transformation of Caires, Clotaire and other cities into entertainment resorts for Rushmore’s rich and famous seemed instinctively to go against the values of the country – particularly in the north-east of Candelaria.

Hrehoresin’s new Modern Liberal Party had a plan up their sleeve however, in the form of a young career politician (with party lists these days, you could afford to be), named David Clark. Once the Candelariasian press had got over the whole same-name-as-you-know-who-but-without-an-e thing, Clark became a highly popular transport minister. Clark’s job, aside from sorting out the buses etc., was to carefully criticise aspects of the Hrehoresin government without being too harsh on the President or his policy. Week after week, Clark appeared on television to admit that not enough was being done to tackle high-level corruption, that worker’s rights needed better protection, that women, Hispanics, ethnic minorities and the poor still faced resilient glass ceilings in their efforts to make it in business and politics, that there still existed great income inequality, that the government had gone too far in its privatisation schemes, that Hrehoresin was risking alienating much of the country by encouraging the continued rural exodus, that the government was failing to deal adequately with the growing brain drain brought on by new CNCR employment laws and the greater education achievements under the MLP.

Israel Clark

It was a dangerous game, but one which paid off. In the 1996 elections Clark won 41.5% of the PV and the MLP a further thirty-nine constituencies, leaving them with 122 seats to the Unionists’ thirty-seven. It was still fewer than half, but in Candelariasian terms it constituted a landslide and Clark was installed as President in record time.

Clark opted to take power under his middle name Israel, ostensibly to avoid further confusion with the former President David Clarke. Clark’s own faith was as a convert to Seventh-day Adventism, a bemusing revelation to Candelariasians both used to a lack of coverage of their political leaders’ religious views and taking it as read that they would be of mainstream Christian denomination or none. The real problem was Clark’s failure to publicly discuss the intricacies of his obscure religion prior to his election but in practical terms, though his church became briefly famous, his religious beliefs were seen to have little impact on his years in power. A vegan himself, the Clark government attempted – and to a great degree, succeeded – to encourage vegetarianism as the ultimate ‘healthy eating’ choice. Clark’s own views on abortion and similar ethical issues were mostly in line with the country as a whole, but his government still resisted calls to raise the cut-off for legality.

For the most part, the Clark era represented a period of fine-tuning Hrehoresin’s C&M. The President introduced new programmes aimed at improving and deregulating state education, healthcare and child care, and was quick to be seen to be taking a firm line on large companies that undermined their employees’ rights. Clark was similarly keen to focus on ending discrimination against minority groups, with a fervour arguably not seen since the previous President Clarke. His efforts to bridge the poverty gap proved less successful, despite regular new initiatives from across the ministries. Both long- and short-term unemployment also remained a major concern, which Clark began to attempt to deal with by encouraging the growth of C&M’s armed forces and nationalising elements of the new boom industries of gambling and uranium mining.

Clark’s consistently high approval ratings were helped by the opposition’s struggles. The MLP had won enough seats to require only the support of small parties to prop up the government, which had come in the form of the First Liberal Party (the remnant of the post-Clarke Liberal Party that had declined to become Modern Liberals) – the Independent Liberal Party under the youthful Paula Hochhauser, and the north Candelarian seat surprisingly won by Mary Luther under the Christian Concern banner. As a result the rest of the big four, plus the two Marquez parties, were free to reconstruct their parties away from government, but their attempts to do so brought mixed success. It was a mark of how far the Conservatives had fallen that winning thirty seats seemed acceptable enough for Barnicoat to be kept on as leader, but the SD&GP were rather less willing to rest on their laurels. Nigel Vyne resigned as leader, though he remained an important frontbencher, to be replaced by Jacque Boyd.

The straight-talking Boyd seemed unafraid to tackle the struggle at the heart of the SD&GP. Under Vyne the socialism of old had well and truly transferred to social democracy, but in an effort to seek new support outside the north-east the SD&GP had attempted to portray itself as the party of the disenfranchised; of the poor, the sick and the mentally infirm alike, of the islands’ non-white population and those from minority cultural or religious backgrounds. They went far beyond the MLP or Unionists in their support for multiculturalism, a far cry from a party that once campaigned furiously against the attempts by Clarke, Kyle and others before them to ‘rainbowize’ the cities. For any SD&GP leader though, there was always going to be a difficult balancing act to achieve. The reality was that the increasing bulk of the party’s support came from not from working class and minority groups but middle-class liberals; economically secure enough to feel able to support the tax hikes and monetary redistribution proposed by the party, safe enough in their own conservative, suburban lives to willingly back the party’s support for alternative lifestyles. Similarly, in their support for individual liberty over social conformity, they were regularly criticised for giving succour to religious groups with often extreme anti-western views while attempting to maintain the image of a stubbornly secular party.

Boyd managed to scale this tightrope well however, but the party’s brick wall to power remained the fact that the MLP, now under Clark, were becoming ‘nice’ again. With the Tories focusing on various reform and economic issues, it was left for the Unionists to take on the baton of being unpleasant, going back to their Merchantist roots under Tim Thompson to focus on what they saw as the increasing moral decay of Candelariasian society and the decrepitude of the current capitalist system. Thompson was one of the first explicitly Christian Unionist leaders, whose rhetoric in promoting the Judeo-Christian and Western tradition of the Candelarias, in strict contrast to the multicultural attitudes of most of his predecessors, won him plenty of friends, enemies and attention. With growing concerns over the numbers of Muslims, Djocorangans and Han coming to C&M – people with little prior understanding of C&M’s cultural heritage – Thompson looked capable of capturing the zeitgeist.

In December 1999 however Thompson suffered a pulmonary embolism and died, leaving a power vacuum within the Unionist ranks that was filled briefly by the veteran Thomas ffinch and later Thompson’s right-hand man Allen Mainge. Neither however seemed to have the necessary common touch, and the party instead plumped again for Eric White, the man who Clark had defeated with embarrassing ease just three years earlier. Clark looked all but unstoppable anyhow and the MLP looked guaranteed of notching-up sixteen straight years in power, the longest in Candelariasian history – not least when, at the last minute, Haimon Pounder’s small parliamentary First Liberals agreed to reabsorb back into the MLP.

In the final reckoning, the MLP picked up 107 seats; rather less than had been expected but still fifty-eight more than their nearest challengers, the Unionists. Not that the rest of the House was stable, though. Boyd’s SD&GP picked up an extra seventeen seats while the Conservatives dropped eight; lifting the SD&GP more than twenty seats clear of the Tories and leaving Barnicoat’s party barely ahead of the PNM. Elsewhere, the Libertarian-Unionists were the major breakthrough party. Looking to go rather further than the Hrehoresin-led free market reforms, Hasson Lazarus’ party took their nod from the Capitalizt SLANI and other states, though in practise many of its members had rather more in common with their former Unionist colleagues than they cared to admit. Most attention however was given to a group with just one seat in the House gained through picking up 0.7% of the PV – the Association of Nationalist Parties, under David Wild.

It is arguable that far-right elements had been a feature of all major Candelariasian political parties for many decades, but never before had an entity so unashamed found its way into the House. Wild’s achievement led to many months of public debate over the future of the country’s political system, bringing publicly to the table for the first time the increasing acknowledgement that the current method was fatally flawed. Lifting the threshold for representation was considered, though on this at least the ANP had the support of the Libertarian-Unionists, Workers’ Party and Independent Liberals. Equally of course, the apparently growing scourge of racism became a hot topic, but minority groups weren’t spared harsh words either, particularly in March 2001 when a white schoolboy was shot dead after getting unwittingly caught up in the crossfire of a gang war within Khatib-Gassett’s Turkish community. Horror stories of innocent young ‘indigenous’ Candelarians falling foul of their lawless peers came to dominate the press, and Clark seemed unable or unwilling to avoid the ANP exploiting the issue.

The post-2000 government was now an awkward coalition of the MLP and SD&GP, with the latter’s Paul Leach serving as Clark’s Prime Minister. Reliant on his partners’ votes, Clark was forced to dramatically scale down the uranium mining industry – eventually to today’s negligible levels – and focus instead on encouraging the ‘gamblification’ of further cities, a controversial policy not only for the ethical concerns but over fears of turning C&M into a country set up for the benefit of tourists more than locals. Green issues naturally came to dominate Clark’s second term as well, with the government suddenly committed to taxing polluting companies and organisations and rapidly introducing alternative forms of power.

As 2004 approached, it became clear that the battle for Robinson House, and the House of Representatives, would once again be between the MLP and Unionists; though this time the tables were reversed. The government’s candidate for two decades in power was Solomon McPhee, a seventy year-old barely audible beneath his significant moustache. What did McPhee believe in? It was unclear. “Onward, ever onward” was his motto, and his pronouncements in television interviews seeming confused and fluffy compared to his main rival in the Presidential race, the Unionist leader James Anderson.

President Anderson

Anderson was young, straight-talking, calm, seemingly sympathetic, and generally a carbon-copy of the last two Presidents, aside from his party allegiance. On the face of it, he seemed as much the establishment figure as McPhee, but his expressed beliefs seemed to tally more closely with the Candelariasian people. He was as distrustful of patriotism as his illustrious Unionist predecessors, backing multiculturalism at a time when it remained under threat – but like Thompson he was willing to criticise recent policies that had encouraged a fragmentation of society along ethnic and cultural lines. Unlike many of his colleagues he was happy to reach out to minority groups more usually courted by the SD&GP – environmentalists, the LGBT community, Muslims, students. He declined to trumpet his own Catholicism, or indeed religious convictions in general, preferring to stress the common values that bound C&M society together. He mentioned concepts like ‘society’ and ‘community’ rather a lot, actually, but Candelariasians can be as much suckers for that sort of nonsense sometimes as anyone else and lapped up the Andersonites’ new buzzwords.

At the same time, he appeared unafraid to tackle the big issues; happily admitting that he would raise taxes considerably – particularly those on cigarettes, alcohol and petrol – to fund a massive programme of educational funding and nationalisation. He struck a compassionate, humane – even scientific – stance on law & order issues, promising a complete reform of the country’s prison system, the large-scale deployment of CCTV cameras, and a full review of the science behind sentencing. Education similarly became an important plank of his campaign, and he was willing to take the initially unpopular view that C&M was too highly skilled as a country, and required more investment in so-called ‘vocational training’.

Unlike his immediate predecessors, Anderson promoted himself as a first among equals within the Unionist machine rather than the star turn. Veteran party figures such as Hermione Bent, Saul Lewis and Eric White were given important front bench roles and, unusually, popular media personalities were encouraged not only to publicly support the Unionists but join the cause as politicians – community cohesion campaigner Landi Gerrard-Landolfi, chat show host Joseph Frank and former chief inspector of schools Jack Montgomerie among them. Established MPs were coaxed into crossing the floor, while politically inexperienced professionals not yet in the House became spokespeople promised ministerial briefs after the election. If this was a bid to mask Anderson’s own history as a career politician it certainly worked, and the press rapidly became enamoured with dealing with a party whose major figures mostly weren’t even MPs.

McPhee’s MLP attempted to introduce their own wave of telegenic new faces, while the SD&GP’s promise of gender balanced party lists failed to win much sympathy to Paul Leach’s male dominated inner circle. To little surprise, the Unionists ended the MLP’s sixteen years in power though the degree of Anderson’s victory was unexpected. With the PV vote and Constituencies combined, he picked up 103 seats, with the MLP loosing over half of theirs to take forty-nine. Without Boyd at the helm, the SD&GP lost three, while Tate Sayfritz’ Conservatives gained just one. Remarkable is this election was how many parties were able to gain election to the House – the Libertarian-Unionists for the first time, alongside Free Marquez, the Christian People’s Party, Humanist Party, Workers’ Party, Independent Representation Party and the Alliance of Nationalist Parties. In hindsight, it may have been a contributory factor to C&M’s failure to collapse into more damaging recriminations in the aftermath of the later Beatrice event that so many parties and candidates, from the far-left to the far-right, were successfully vetted by the establishment and proved willing and able to uphold the Candelariasian Conspiracy. No one political wing could become a scapegoat, nor could any become a particular lightning rod for public trust amidst their anger.

In office, Anderson and his broad-based coalition with the Tories and Libertarian-Unionists remained popular, though the obvious signs of the promised social revolution were slow in coming. As his term ground on however, C&M began to suffer another economic downturn and even Anderson was forced to admit that the country’s tax burden had been raised beyond any justification. Sporting success and the government’s widely approved handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Neil gave the Unionists’ ratings a boost, and the party headed into the election with a narrow lead over the MLP – who were hoping, in Robyn Morton, to have found the country’s first female premier – and the SD&GP – in turn aiming to pull off an unlikely double-whammy in putting Ariadne Jefferson in Robinson House as C&M’s first black President – trailing in a distant third place.

The International Era

The provision of an accurate account of C&M’s emergence onto the international stage is hamstrung by the country’s use of so-called Time Dilation Devices – ostensibly to better facilitate the temporally sluggish archipelago’s involvement in international sport – which ensured that the ensuing period may be considered to have lasted some thirty years, beginning under President Kyle, or barely three years initiated by President James Anderson in 2007. Reliability of documented accounts and the memories of the Candelariasian populace is further depreciated by the effects of the 2010 Beatrice Event.

What can be said is that this period saw a dramatic shift in C&M’s post-independence policy of isolationism. While the popular name given to the period derives from the opening up the domestic football league, the CMSC, to players from outside C&M or the CNCR, and the fifteen-cycle presence of the national football team in World Cup football, it was also characterised by the establishment of a greater presence on the multiversal stage beyond sport (indeed, the establishment of an overseas embassy programme predated any decisions related to sport by some months). Candelaria And Marquez is generally considered the first Rushmori nation to take this step – though predated by decades by the Republic of Liventia, the Tempalian nation was not recognised as Rushmori until relatively recently.

While C&M’s presence on the international stage provided a significant economic dividend as well as, after a slow start, considerable sporting glory and a deep sense of national pride, it became an increasing headache for the authorities to maintain hitherto largely unchallenged elements of state policy. For decades, it had been the policy of the Candelariasian state to deny the existence of non-human sapience, alongside a range of other unexpected attributes of the wider worlds – the very existence of other worlds among them – that most previously oblivious nations would steadily begin to acknowledge and accept as their integration into the multiversal community deepened. In C&M, the reverse proved true. A clandestine government security agency, the M.O.R.T. – operating in public under various guises, but at the dawn of the International Era as the supposedly anti-disinformation Ministry of Rational Thought – adopted increasingly drastic measures to keep as much of the population as possible in the dark, and prevent the remainder from publicly speaking out.

With international tourism and business travel still limited, sport presented the most significant challenge. Televised matches were frequently shown on delay, with CGI used to alter the appearance of the most physically unusual or otherwise inexplicable of opposition players, while elaborate pseudo-scientific backstories were provided to explain away the appearance of species such as elves and gnomes. Away supporters were tightly chaperoned, or on occasion ferried to vast sets in rural locales in the Candelarias built to represent imagined nations, rather than be allowed to make their way to countries home to sapient mice, and the like. Media outlets practised self-censorship lest their journalists join other would-be whistle-blowers in facing imprisonment or exile. A handful of others were publicly ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, with state stooges (witting or otherwise) used as lighting rods for media mockery of rumours of foreign ‘weirdness’.

Secret wars

Following the proposed ‘Short International Era’ timeline; the 2008 general election that saw the Candelarias’ first female leader, and its most right-wing for decades, the MLP’s Robyn Morton, come to power was marred by a series of bombings in populated areas of Albrecht. The worst combined act of terrorism in Candelariasian history, resulting in 331 confirmed fatalities, would later be attributed to the anarchist Mujeongbu group, though no perpetrators nor accessories were ever charged. A series of other incidents, also causing a number of fatalities, across the country during the preceding weeks were attributed to a variety of mundane causes at the time, though it would later become public knowledge that the M.O.R.T. believed that a foreign entity of unclear providence – but almost certainly likewise connected to the Han Empire – had spent much of this year intentionally causing the Candelarias to intersect with a number of alternate realities. The singing beans never did go away entirely.

Shortly after, the country was briefly at war with an overseas entity for the first time since 1919, after the Emperor Boston of Bostopia declared war in retaliation for the theft of a number of rare ducks by M.O.R.T. agents as part of a bid to suppress public awareness of the aforesaid paranormal events. In practice, with the Bostopian government having declared ‘The Emperor Isn’t Allowed to Declare Bostopia is at a State of War With Anybody Month’, the aggressor combatant consisted of a fourteen acre stretch of Fort Boston park, the castle therein, its three official inhabitants and several suits of armour, ornamental swords, guard dogs, pointy twigs, etc. C&M’s publicly declared lack of a military budget however still enforced Morton’s own undisclosed ‘invasion’ of Fort Boston Castle, alongside several ministers and a nice man from the national caravanning club, which concluded with the Emperor knocked out with a frying pan by his wife and a peace treaty signed over tea. No-one died, apart from a guard dog after an unfortunate incident involving the castle’s laser defence system and a packet of croutons.

This event however – public knowledge in Bostopia but unreported in C&M until the post-Beatrice period – set the tone for Morton’s presidency, though the engagements that would follow would be considerably more harrowing for those concerned.

While the national football team was en route to their debut World Cup victory, Gordon Bay City suffered invasion from a large group of recalcitrant, mostly youthful, faeries, whipped up into a rage against their elders by their firebrand leader, Leohi. Abandoning their hellish pocket dimension, these beings – who called themselves the Kolan – established their rule over GBC under their self-proclaimed queen, establishing their own breakaway state. The M.O.R.T. and the small Candelariasian military, while by now used to dealing with modest incursions by all manner of unfamiliar lifeforms and other oddities of the wider worlds, had yet tackled nothing on this scale. The C&M government took advantage of a small outbreak of avian flu elsewhere in the islands to declare the new statelet sequestered from the rest of the Candelarias.

Soon after, GBC experienced a considerably larger influx of non-human life, invited by Queen Leohi’s brother Aino, turning the microstate overnight into one of the most species diverse in the known multiverse. A series of internal ructions, and an alliance between disaffected Kolan and their human subjects, resulted in the rapid collapse of Leohi’s regime. Years later, it would become apparent that actions led by Morton had foiled the former Queen’s attempt to use TDDs to wipe Candelaria And Marquez from existence, but was rather more fortunate in preventing her attempt, in a final act of spite, to reveal the Candelariasian Conspiracy to the country’s populace. In doing so, however, it was exposed that, unbeknownst to most of their number, the Kolan were not in fact faeries but rather indigenous inhabitants of the islands, driven into the realm of the svartálfar centuries earlier by European settlers. A new Republic of Gordon Bay City was declared, with a power-sharing government. It remained off-limits to Candelariasians for some time yet however, superficially in order to protect the vulnerable aboriginal population (whose existence, if not previous domain, soon became well-established in the C&M press) from outside infections.

At around the same time, an if anything more deleterious situation emerged on semi-autonomous Green Island. The most populous of the Outliers had seen increasing anti-government unrest flaring during World Cup 44, part-hosted in the Candelarias, with Zapata locals mingling with travelling supporters from Bears Armed after several seasons of witnessing the line-up of the local football club, Green Island, increasingly dominated by elves. The island was taken into special measures by Albrecht, its elected council removed, and troops deployed to corral volatile demonstrations by citizens demanding answers. The Candelariasian government acknowledged the subsequent deaths of several protesters, and as the mood continued to darken reacted with desperation by handing administration of the island over to the former CMSC and acting CAMAFA chairman Sam Mc O’Neil.

Over the following months, Mc O’Neil established a cult of personality, instituted collectivised farming and manufacture, and rapidly built a significant number of large football stadia and training facilities across the island. A genetic research programme resulted in the mutilation and deaths of hundreds of children. After coming to appreciate the true scale of the atrocities committed in his name, and with the island outside Zapata largely cut off from the rest of the Candelarias and most C&M citizens oblivious, Candelariasian forces routed Mc O’Neil’s ragtag platoons of the fearful, brainwashed and allied waterfowl, and exposed a devastated island and its psychologically tortured populace.

The Morton administration barely had time to react to Green Island’s reintegration into C&M before the whole country would face the trauma of the Beatrice Event. Weeks of unseasonable dull and cold weather, and a populace beset by nightmares later attributed to the islands’ resident svartálf population, led to frequently violent protests by sleep-deprived crowds uncertain as to what they were protesting against save an unaccountable newfound opposition to international football and its administrators. The Event itself would be one so painful that few Candelariasians have become comfortable discussing it with outsiders over a decade later.

Post-Beatrice

The events of June 2010 rendered the maintenance of the Candelariasian Conspiracy impossible. In theory, the principal reason for its continued existence – the insistence of what had previously been believed to be a society of malevolent extradimensional faeries – had fallen away some time before but, among other concerns, the M.O.R.T. and the C&M government feared that once the truth was finally revealed, particularly if this occurred in a dramatic manner, the country’s population could quickly turn against itself and risk civil war. Later estimations have suggested that something approaching 50% of the populace by this point could be said to be at least almost as aware of the truth of that which the state formally denied as most residents of Oygruppen, and those who were not did indeed rapidly turn their ire against their countryfolk, in particular state officials, journalists, sportspeople and immigrants, blaming them for their silence in return for handouts and employment. Deadly riots became a daily occurrence as the hastily assembled Truth & Reconciliation Commission revealed the often brutal measures taken by the M.O.R.T. and other authorities against even potential dissidents.

President Morton was soon forced from office, and was succeeded by the popular Natalie van Dijk of the third-party SD&GP who formed a unity government credited with seeing the county through the following two years and a gradual return to a more normal life. The SD&GP emerged as the largest party in a highly fractured House following the 2012 elections, with Van Dijk continuing to lead a Broad Left coalition despite renewed public anger towards minority politicians viewed as having been complicit with their major party counterparts, and regarding the lack of criminal accountability of leading officials. Many other Candelariasians continued to support pre-Beatrice mainstream parties and politicians however; both those counted among the so-called ‘Aware’ who now feared for their lives, and others who had reconciled themselves to the necessity of their former leaders’ actions. Even so, come the 2016 election no representatives who had served in the House prior to Beatrice stood for re-election.

That year, a new coalition led by the Progress party took power under C&M’s first ethnic minority premier, Fanny Tan. Having largely absorbed the MLP, Progress had attracted the overwhelming support of the country’s business community – plutocrats who could also count among their number those now largely controlling the Candelariasian media – and was rapidly able to secure deals with the chastened rump of the SD&GP as well as the anti-corruption and exiles’ rights Our Open Eyes grouping to take power for the first time. A mooted ‘grand coalition’ deal with Kevin Cornett’s Unionists had failed to gain traction after the far-right Candelarias Unity Alliance won the third largest share of seats, with the country’s political mainstream unwilling to allow the CUA’s Isaac Duffy to become the official Leader of the Opposition. A flip side to the CUA’s continued advance was the election of the most diverse House in C&M’s history, including its first confirmed non-human member, Othulalorn the Ent, as the member for the Candelariasian population in Gordon Bay City.

Focusing on combating the still severe economic repercussions of the Event, Tan received criticism for sidestepping national reconciliation and renewed separatist sentiment on Marquez and the Outliers, and both praise and disapproval for disregarding public antipathy towards immigration levels and the media’s growing preoccupation with so-called ‘culture war’ issues. The stewardship of Finance Secretary Timothy Towers, and the President’s own ‘fannynomics’, were widely deemed successes. Retaining high public support, Progress increased their vote share at the 2020 election to a point close to an unprecedented outright victory; and allied in government with the populist Peasants Party, founded two years earlier by TV satirist Leon Spencer. The PP were not the only new arrivals in parliament – a leaked recording providing a rare political misstep for Tan and giving rise to the Moriarty Party under entrepreneur Sterling Featherstone. Their successes in both House and National Council elections appeared to confirm C&M’s rightward shift, and provide an outlet for voters disaffected with the pre-Beatrice establishment parties, current government and far-right alike.

As was the case twelve years earlier, the full impact of the subsequent events of November 2020 have yet to be well analysed by international sources.