Zelsari Republic
"Freedom, Democracy, Unity"
Official Name: Zelsari Republic
Short Form: Zelsar
Capital City: Byzinten
Capital Planet: Zelsar, Zelzar System
Government: Unitary "constitutional" presidential republic
Leader: President Cornelius D'Horti
Ruling Party: Justice and Development Coalition (Authoritarian Democrat)
- The President of Zelsar is elected by popular vote every five years, with unlimited terms. President Cornelius D'Horti has recently begun his third term in yet another hotly disputed election.
- The Zelsari Congress is quite small by the standards of galactic republics, with each system sending one hundred representatives to Byzinten for a total of four hundred members.
- The executive powers of the President are extremely broad. He has control over defense, foreign affairs and even economic policies with little congressional oversight, and has sole control over appointing the judges of the Court of Cassation.
History:
Zelsar has a long and troubled history, rivaled only by Albion for sheer levels of civil strife. With a relative young recorded history of only about 6000 years, civil strife was not an uncommon feature of its early history. Thousands of years ago, two large nation-states whose descendants make up Zelsar's current ethnic groups, the Yetari Empire and the Qarun Republic, fought for centuries at varying levels of intensity, ending in a victory for the Qaruni that resulted in the proclamation of the Zelsari Republic, or the "First Republic." While the First Republic would face intense political struggles of its own from a vestigial Yetarian movement, eventually the system stabilized and a relatively peaceful democratic system maintained itself for nearly one thousand years. This peace would be shattered by a powerful proto-syndicalist movement that collapsed the planet into a hundred years of brutal civil war, eventually resulting in an establishment coalition crushing the revolutionaries and establishing a new, more authoritarian regime referred to as the "Second Republic."
This, too, would not last forever, and the victorious Coalition eventually turned on itself again. Yet another civil war raged for another hundred years, between the incumbent Zelsar People's Party, which would become one of the most nefarious political groupings in the galaxy, and scattered opposition militias and parties. The ZPP, after a great deal of bloodletting, eventually abolished the Republic in all but name, and a hundred years later abolished that as well, renaming the state the Zelsar Union and eliminating the last traces of the popular franchise. Space colonization began around this time, and for a time the Zelsari state prospered - the last extended period of prosperity it would experience to date.
During this time, the ZPP perfected its brutal autocracy, engaging in a sinister campaign of rewriting history. Much of the pre-Union period of Zelsari history has been lost to the ZPP's "thought police," with the above being mostly based on reconstructions. Yetarian and Qaruni ethnic identities alike were brutally suppressed in favor of a conception of a "New Zelsari Man" unbound by traditional culture. The Zelsari language, a descendant of Old Qaruni, was itself heavily edited, eliminating thousands upon thousands of words and making it almost resemble a computing language in its lack of ability for poetic expression. And, of course, individual rights and liberties were utterly quashed, with citizens who defied or even appeared to defy the ZPP disappearing into the night without warning. The general populace was kept sated with generous government subsidies funded by the wealth brought on by space colonization, which encouraged the state to deplete the resources of the homeworld and the other planets of the metropole. Accordingly, combined with natalist policies to encourage a strong army and navy, the population boomed.
Over time, the ZPP kicked the can down the road with respect to its population and resource crises, until around An. 3 when it faced a severe problem. Unrest on the homeworld was high, and people were refusing to move to the other systems in the metropole (the government found little use for extragalactic colonization). Dissidents were increasing in number, and the other metropolitan worlds could not support them. The government came to a solution so brutal that not only would it bring widespread galactic condemnation but triggered yet another brutal civil war that would annihilate what little hard-won prosperity the country had accumulated. Three billion people, deemed in one way or another undesirable by the Zelsari government, were packed onto what they were told were colonization ships. The state simply revoked their residency permits, as was its right, and issued new ones for other worlds in the Union, and people boarded them. These ships would never reach their destinations, as they were deliberately designed with faulty reactors that would detonate after several weeks of extended operation, and just like that, three billion of Zelsar's population vanished.
This was too much for even the docile people of Zelsar, and widespread anger and despair at the brutality of the ZPP came to a head. The first to turn against the Party was the military, led by Marshal Balthazar Hedreath. Second came another group, led by a young army colonel named Baxter Van Zandt, better known by his nom de guerre that he took in honor of one of the doomed moral victors of the late Second Republic: Colonel Alexander Seeford. Van Zandt, henceforth referred to as Seeford, was a rarity in Zelsar. He was, unbeknownst to most, educated in Baekdu by a military eager to steal technological secrets, and was a true idealistic republican of the highest order. He resolved to bring down the Union entirely, instead of merely handing it to Marshal Hedreath, who held a preponderance of state assets and would have likely emerged victorious without outside assistance. Seeford at first cooperated with the Marshal to wipe out the ZPP forces, then turning on him. As brilliant a military leader as he was a politician, Seeford outmaneuvered Hedreath's armies at every turn, even winning many of them over with his impassioned pleas for democracy. After eleven terrible years, in a conflict that racked up as many casualties as the War of the Foundation hundreds of years ago, Seeford won against all odds, and found himself as president of the Third Zelsari Republic.
While a democrat, Seeford found himself ruling a country that did not match his ideals. His party, the Democratic Republican Party of Zelsar (DRPZ,) was filled mainly with his own appointees because few people not associated with the old regimes could be persuaded to run. It occupied nearly a 90% majority in Congress until Seeford himself saw fit to create an opposition, Forward Zelsar (FZ,) whose policies he mostly dictated and whose members were also mainly his appointees. He joined the Republican League and professed the virtues of democracy while tolerating little dissent from his program of reindustrialization and modernization at home. He begged Congress to take initiative in repairing the country and respond to the people, but was often forced to rule by decree in the face of its inaction and incompetence. In truth, the Zelsari republican movement was by this point quite small, and most were so cowed by Seeford's impressive displays that they simply chose to do whatever he said. Unlike, for example, Baekdu, Celtia or Azeratii, with well-developed and vibrant political cultures, Zelsar had to be dragged out of autocracy, and drag it he attempted to do. Seeford did everything he could to reign in the power of the military he relied on (though over time he became less dedicated to doing so, siding with the Army over Congress late in his term when things weren't going his way) and rebuild the devastated nation, but it was difficult for him to affect meaningful change in either respect. After his second term was over in An. 24, he retired with surprisingly little fanfare. A year later, he shot himself in his home in Byzinten.
The DRPZ died with Seeford, as did much of the old FZ. What remained was quickly taken over by neo-Populists and offshoot movements that preached "organic government." After such a grouping nearly won a congressional supermajority, the military, full of Seefordist liberals and anti-Populists, declared the election invalid, dissolved Congress, set up the liberal Republican Center Party to contest the new Forward Zelsar, and held a new election that saw the RCP fend off FZ in a narrow win. Thus would begin a familiar pattern, with the military allowing free and open elections - as long as they were won by the Republican Center Party, with less liberal parties seeing swift military intervention with varying degrees of success. None of this promoted good governance, with GDP per capita falling over the period and much of the War of the Third Republic-era damage remaining even in some of the largest cities.
In An. 32, a new kind of opposition party was formed: the Justice and Development Coalition. Composed of largely ethnic Yetarians, or at least those with Yetarian names, this party promoted traditional values and conservatism but proudly proclaimed their allegiance to the Third Republic. The military allowed them to compete unmolested, and they won, sweeping President Cornelius D'Horti into power in An. 34. President D'Horti won accolades across the Republican world for finally bringing good, suitably democratic governance to Zelsar not from the barrel of a gun. He, too, however, would quickly become a tyrant, like so many before him. D'Horti quickly spurned the Republican League after a dispute about elerium weapons escalated, cracking down on dissent and seeing military and Seefordist conspiracies wherever he looked. In his second term, he edited electoral laws to give his party a massive structural advantage, and continued his brutal crackdown on the press and civil liberties, earning widespread League scorn to little practical effect. Now, in his third term, he is merely a few steps away from declaring himself Dictator, which many claimed to be a personal ambition of his. But will he, knowing yet another civil war could be on the horizon - one his country could ill afford? Or will he take a different path?
