NationStates Jolt Archive

Henri Calvin stood before the press alongside Rhodri Llewellyn and, shockingly, Achille La Rocca. Calvin had a gift for always looking the calm, respectable country gentleman, a gift that placed him in sharp contrast to the Llewellyn, who looked like the urban megacapitalist he was, and La Rocca, who gave the impression of being both firey and effeminate at the same time, an impression only possible for a lifelong intellectual.

Smiling languidly, Calvin took his time adjusting the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen of the press, as you all know, polls aren't showing a likely victory by any party. As you remember, the last election lacked a clear victor too and we wound up with a coalition cobbled together after the fact and putting forth policies very different from what most Danaans wanted when they went to the polls. Very different indeed." Llewellyn frowned slightly at this comment but Calvin did not even glance in his direction. "I believe that the Danaan people need a clear choice, an option they can vote for and know they can win. That's why I and my compatriots have been negotiating a coalition before the election, a coalition capable of winning a clear majority. The people deserve a clear choice if democracy is to mean anything, after all. It just wouldn't be right otherwise." There was neither excitement nor boredom in Calvin's speech. He spoke as though he was gathered with a few friends in the drawing room after a dinner party. "I'd like to give all of you my pledge, and the pledge of these men here with me, and of our parties, to enter a Patriotic Coalition, win or loose."

The press immediately exploded with questions. "Your Excellency, does this mean you've forgiven the Patriots for their participation in the Karamanlis Government?" "How can you enter a coalition with republicans after the stress your party has placed upon royalist institutions?" "How do you feel about the dangerous extremists on the right and the left attempted to wedge themselves in to Parliamentary politics?"

Calvin smiled and held up both his hands. "Please, please, one at a time, ladies and gentlemen. Let's start with you, Mr. Onn. My wife and I very much enjoyed your piece on Christmas traditions by the way..."

Several days later, Minerva Karamanlis stood with Abraham Goldfarb, Haben Caddick, Kinta Rainwater, and Radman Nastula at a similar press conference. The Prime Minister stood in a simple lady's suit ending in a long skirt. Caddick was in a fashionable pantsuit and Rainwater in a dress with subdued Amerindian symbolic markings. Goldfarb and Nastula were simply in dark blue suits. Karamanlis was speaking about the new Patriotic Coalition. "Of course it doesn't surprise me to see Calvin and La Rocca on the same stage. The Nationalist agenda has never been about God or King or Country, whatever the adds might say. It's always been about excluding cultural or religious minorities (including secularists); trading in our most fundamental freedom for security measures which won't even make us safer; refusing to enforce the law whenever a violent or sexual crime is committed by a husband, a father, or a clergyman; closing our borders to hard workers who could help our economy; eliminating our already too small social security net even as they make our workforce less competitive internationally by slashing our education budget; forming closer relations with dictatorships and theocracies...I could go on like this, of course, but I'd rather get to my main announcement, the formation of the Progressive Coalition..."

"We can no longer afford to conduct a foreign policy with such disregard for the realities of the international scene. It is not within the power of the Resurgent Dream or any nation to..." Rhodri Llewellyn paused in the middle of his campaign speech to students at the University of Thorlund at Agwenberg to look at the young aid moving across the stage. "I'm sorry." he said to the students. The aide arrived and whispered in the Federal Minister's ear, producing a severe frown. When Llewellyn addressed the crowd again, his voice was sombre. "I've just received word that the Federal Building in Solomon has been the scene of a terrorist attack. I have to go back to Tarana immediately." At that, he turned and moved hurriedly off the stage.

Chancellor Balduin Taegert, a plump, middle-aged man with a thick white beard, hurried up to the microphone as the Minister left. "The Minister has duties to attend to. I know many of you have friends and loved ones in Solomon who you need to call. I am going to need to go find out what exactly is happening myself. There will be a public gathering to express our solidarity with the people of Solomon tomorrow at noon. Until then, I'd ask you all to remain calm and to keep the victims of this cowardly attack in your thoughts and prayers."

"...the hypocrisy of a Government which purports to defend liberal democratic principles when it itself is in power only through convenient political alliance, rather than the will of the people, which delivered a plurality to its opposition." Irene spoke calmly but strongly. This dinner in Tarana was the first foreign leg of her speaking tour which had already toured Pantocratoria, a speaking tour which represented Irene's first major political statement since losing the second 2004 election. "Are we to take seriously those who claim to be acting in defence of an ideal, a principle, when they themselves do not abide by that ideal? Prime Minister Karamanlis has a lot to commend her, and is a woman of significant achievement, but can claim no electoral mandate, no mandate from the people, which justify her power."

Irene sipped a glass of water nearby and paused for a few moments before resuming. Her speaking style on this tour wasn't at all like the aggressive shouting and screeching or the disdainful address for which she was once known in the Pantocratorian Parliament.

"The truth is that the Prime Minister's ideology is either fundamentally dishonest, self-delusional, or both." Irene asserted. "Liberalism is supposed to be about the triumph of the individual and the protection of the rights of the individual. What we see instead from the leader of the Danaan Liberals is moralism, plain and simple. The imposition of the will of the moral majority on the individual. Moralism is not a policy I disagree with, but surely it is inconsistent with the stated objectives of Danaan Liberalism! Of course, the Prime Minister and I would share a lot more ideology in common if she were consistently moralist, but she does manage to equivocate and flit back and forth between two apparently contradictory philosophies. She opposes abortion, but then supports the right of Danaan citizens to belong to a terrorist organisation, the bogeyman of foreign policy in the North Atlantic, the Order of the Invisible Hand. Clearly freedom of association is more important to the Prime Minister than a woman's right to control her own body."

"And what can one say about Henri Calvin? Is there any condemnation more damning than his own behaviour..." Irene continued.

Beatrice Wake folded her hands in her lap as she looked over at Baeth O'Biernes. She couldn't believe she'd been invited to be on the O'Biernces Zone, nor could she remember why she'd accepted. Granted, it might help with her campaign for Parliament but...

"We're on!" cried out a voice from just off the stage. Both Wake and her host turned to the camera. She was a thirty-seven year old, brown-haired lawyer in an imported Knootian pantsuit. He was a balding, rough looking man in a more conservative, business-style suit of the sort generally worn to work by Wintermore executives.

"We have here today the author of The Masks of Race and Faith: How Women are the Ultimate Target of All Fundamentalisms and The Deadly Infection: The Danger of Domestic Terrorism in Pantocratorian Ambara. She's also an Emancipation Party candidate for Parliament from Pele." O'Biernes began. "Now, Miss Wake, in your last book you argued that there was as great a chance of domestic terrorism arising in Danaan Ambara in the form of Islamism, Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, or some splinter from Oriental Orthodoxy as there was of it arising through Protestant recruits to the Sons of the Reformation. Now, that claim was not taken very seriously when you first made it, was it, Miss Wake?"

Beatrice laughed lightly. "Not at all. They said..."

"The Karamanlis Government didn't take those security threats very seriously at all." Baeth claimed. "Until last week, when the terrorists responsible for the Solomon bombing were caught and proved not to be Protestant anti-semites but Ultra-Orthodox Jews. To me, this seems to say that we'll have to tighten our anti-terrorism laws and crack down on extremists."

"Well..." Beatrice answered. "I don't think there's much reason to sacrifice our individual freedoms for an illusion of greater security. If you really want to eliminate the root of this kind of deeply misogynistic fundamentalist extremism, you need to take on the social forces that cultivate it, far right, would-be theocratic clergy and so-called family values..."

"Hold it right there, Miss Wake. You can't possibly mean to say that respectable clergymen, ordinary orthodox rabbis or National Protestant pastors, should be robbed of their right to religious freedom just because a few terrorists might have a few similar beliefs?"

"I am saying that when a member of the legislature of a Danaan principality proposes, as the Patriot Party's Mr. Juerg Haefeli of the Zutern Council proposed just two weeks ago, an act giving clerics a substantial degree of state power over the lives of women, then..."

"That act didn't pass, Miss Wake. Come on! Just because one Zutern Councillor proposed something like that hardly means that Danaan conservatives are behind any such things." Baeth responded in an exasperated tone. "Now, can we please get back to the issue of terrorism? I thought that your book was insightful and invited you here to talk about that, not listen to a campaign rant."

"I'm trying to talk about terrorism!" Beatrice protested with rising frustration. "It doesn't come out of nowhere because someone decides to go out and embrace evil in some vast metaphysical struggle. I know as well as you do that most Danaan religious conservatives don't hold views as extreme as Mr. Haefeli, but four of the seven Patriots on the Council voted for it. And, if it had passed and then been struck done by the courts, as it fortunately would have been, then you wouldn't be making apologies for a dangerous extremist in your party but complaining about the liberal judi..." She paused as she slowly realized her microphone had been cut off.

"That's not what I'd be saying at all, Miss Wake." answered Baeth with a smug smile. "Unfortunately, that's all the time we have with Miss Wake. Thank you for coming out. You've been a lovely guest."