NationStates Jolt Archive


The New Dawn

Espandorra
21-11-2007, 20:47
The Government had hoped that the election would give them a mandate. For several years now, the government of Espandorra had not received the confidence of the Congress of Deputies and yet its leaders had not resigned and the King had made no move to dissolve the Cortes. In effect, the constitutional norms which had previously governed Espandorra had been suspended and the liberal majority of the present Congress was effectively excluded from actual power.

The current government consisted of five traditionalist parties, namely, the Integrist Party, Catholic Labor Party, Traditionalist Carlist Communion, Action Espandorra and Catholic Action. Because there was no preferential voting in Espandorra, the leaders of this coalition had come to believe that the government only had a minority in the Congress because they had each contested every seat. During this election, they had decided to all support the candidate of whichever government party was strongest in a given seat.

The two most conservative parties classified as liberal, the Democratic Party and the Monarchist Democratic Party, were both hoping to force their own inclusion in the government by running a campaign encouraging the return to constitutional monarchy and the expansion, rather than replacement, of the current coalition. It was well known that the inclusion of these two parties would give the government a small minority in the Congress and allow it to receive the confidence of that House.

The other liberal parties were running to win. They felt that a resounding victory for the liberals would make it impossible for the King to continue to support a government lacking the confidence of the Congress. The liberals were running largely on the issue of democracy. The people had given them the mandate to govern at the last election and it had been stolen. The liberals intended to recover it.

On election night, however, all received political wisdom is Espandorra went out the window. The election results showed huge gains for a number of parties which had not previously enjoyed any significant popular support. Significant numbers of seats fell to Republican Union, Radical Socialist Republican Party, Radical Republican Party, Republican Left, Republican Action, Socialist Workers’ Party, Syndicalist Party, National Women’s Party, the Conservative Republican Party, the Social Christian Party and the Popular Democratic Party. This long, disjointed list of political parties, many of whom fundamentally disagreed on the major issues, had one thing in common. They were explicitly opposed to the monarchy as such. These republican groups, combined with a few independent republican members of the Congress, the liberals and the autonomist Jewish and Muslim parties from Espandorra’s two predominantly non-Catholic provinces, constituted a substantial majority of the Congress.

King Abel XIII naturally took this rather seriously. He immediately dismissed the government and immediately gave Jorge Bajtera Adega, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, a mandate to form a government to serve until the new Cortes was sworn in. Moreover, he publicly promised to give his mandate to the leader of the largest party in the Congress of Deputies and to only consider other possibilities if that leader was unable to form a government capable of winning the confidence of the Congress. He furthermore pledged to work in good faith with the elected leaders of the Espandorran people.