Hulstria and Gao-Soto

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Kei Yoshimura and other members of Yama celebrate at an election night watch party.

Ethnic Tensions on the Rise in Hulstria and Gao-Soto as Yama, Hulstrian National Party, and Hosian Imperialist Party Make Gains in the Federal Assembly
9 May 5740

MIYAKO, Hilgar - The air crackled with energy and excitement at the Ensō Community Centre in Historic Miyako as attendees of We Can Become a Mountain’s election night watch party eagerly monitored incoming results from across the nation. And that excitement certainly wasn’t for naught, as it managed to come away with over 12% of the total vote share, an impressive amount of growth in comparison to a 5736 snap election when the newly re-registered party only managed to get a measly 0.1%, far below Hulstra and Gao-Soto’s election threshold of 3%.

This will be the first time that We Can Become a Mountain or Yama, as it’s better known, will actively participate in national government for centuries after an interim period where it only operated as a community-based cultural and advocacy organization. So why take the foray into politics now?

It’s actually due to two of the other political parties that did well last night: the Hulstrian National Party and the Hosian Imperialist Party; together they now hold a shared seat count of 185. The two parties have gained widespread notoriety in Kunihito communities due their recent attacks against the use of Kunikata in government. Both voted to repeal the Bilingual Legislative Reform Act, an important piece of legislation that requires government documents to be available in both Kunikata and Dundorfian; the bill was overwhelmingly defeated as all other parties in the Federal Assembly opposed it. When we interviewed Kei Yoshimura, the current Daihyō of Yama, as she was campaigning last month, this is what she about the situation:

“I think pretty much any Kunihito person who’s taken a history class should be aware that rising Hulstrian Nationalism cannot mean anything good. There’s too many examples where our language, our culture, and our mere existence were oppressed or even outright banned when Hulstrian Nationalists came to power. That is why I, and the rest of Yama leadership, thought it was essential to reform and make sure history won’t repeat itself.”

No matter the reason, yesterday’s election is a sure sign of the growing strength of the Kunihito nationalist and separatist movements within Hulstria and Gao-Soto, with polls showing that Yama was the most popular party for Kunihito voters. Outside of the election, the Cooperative Party, another party with Kunihito nationalist leanings, was recently formed, although it only received 0.1% of the vote. And with the growing strength of both Hulstrian and Kunihito nationalist groups it seems Hulstria and Gao-Soto may once again be thrown into chaos by its second and third largest ethnic groups.

After all results were tallied the voting percentages were as follows: the Liberal People’s Party with 32%, the Hulstrian National Party with 22%, Hosian Imperialist Party with 17%, Federal Crownlander People’s Party with 16%, and Yama with 12%.

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Protestors holding signs in Labsburg surround a crowned dinosaur puppet, representing the Rothingren-Traugott Dynasty

Anti-Monarchist Protestors Gather Across Hulstria and Gao-Soto to Demonstrate Against the Election of Karl Rothingren-Traugott-Okatori as Federal President
15 September 5740



LABSBURG, Budenlar - It is estimated that over three hundred thousand people protested across the nation earlier today against the election of Karl Rothingren-Traugott-Okatori, a claimant for the currently non-existent throne of Hulstria and Gao-Soto, as Federal President, with events of varying sizes organized in every major city, as well as a number of towns.

Demonstrations were largely peaceful with very few arrests or incidents reported despite a sizable number of counterprotestors in cities like Miyako and Korriel. 

In Labsburg, thousands of protestors marched around the city centre before converging outside of City Hall with signs that read “Our Republic! Not Your Kingdom!” and “You may be our President, but you’ll never be our king.” Others created an almost celebratory atmosphere, as they played drums and trumpets to rouse the crowd into bouts of chanting.

Otto Krämer, along with his family, traveled over an hour from the small town of Ingelsberg to attend the protest. They brought along a roughly twelve foot tall dinosaur puppet made out of sheets of paper and wood that he said was meant to represent how the Rothingren-Traugott Dynasty and the idea of monarchy in general was antiquated.

When asked why he and his family had come today, Otto replied: “I am a supporter of the Hulstrian National Party at heart, you know, and they haven’t exactly been subtle about their pro-republicanism. It’s one of the reasons I vote for them in the first place! So, as you might expect, I was rather surprised and angry when I turned on the news to find out that they had voted to elect a literal Rothingren-Traugott into the country’s highest office!”

Despite the fact that during the May 5740 election for the Federal Assembly saw pro-republican parties, like the Liberal People’s Party, Hulstrian National Party and We Can Become A Mountain win two thirds of the vote, Rothingren-Traugott-Okatori managed to clinch the office for the Federal Presidency after the Hulstrian Nationalist Party switched their vote to support him instead of their own candidate. 

The results of the election have sparked calls among protestors for a constitutional reform that would allow the Federal President to be elected by a popular vote instead of by the legislature.

Heidi Schuster-Takahashi, a pro-monarchist counterprotestor in Miyako had this to say: “sure, you may not like the man or what he represents. But, you can’t deny that he got to the position he is now in by following the letter of the law. That’s how I know he will be great leader, and would be an even greater monarch.”

[Wu Han]

Dr. Albrecht Fukuyama-Weber at the Union Party founding convention in Kien, Hulstria

Union Party Calls for "New Politics" Amidst Rising Communal Tensions
15 AUGUST 5740
KIEN, HULSTRIA

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The Union Party formally launched this week, holding its founding convention in the capital from August 12–15. The gathering, which drew delegates from across the country and capped months of preparatory negotiations, produced a nominally big-tent party built on a blunt diagnosis: centuries of Septembrist attempts to forge "one nation of two peoples" have not resolved the country's ethnic fractures, and a different constitutional model is needed before those fractures widen further.

The organizing effort was led by Dr. Albrecht Fukuyama-Weber, the founding leader of the Union Party, who before entering politics was regarded as one of the world's leading scholars of divided societies and consociational constitutional design. "For generations, governments have attempted to resolve our divisions by encouraging communities to converge into a single identity," he told delegates. "Yet history has shown that one's identity cannot be legislated away."

A line from his own research, now echoed in the party's literature, put it more starkly: "A divided society does not become united because its divisions are ignored. It becomes united when its divisions are transformed from sources of conflict into foundations of cooperation."

The Union Party's arrival follows a Federal Assembly election and Presidential election that alarmed moderates across the political spectrum. On one hand, the Hulstrian National Party and the Hosian Imperialist Party made sweeping gains on a platform openly hostile to Kunikata-language rights, pushing to repeal the Bilingual Legislative Reform Act prior to the polls. On the other hand, the Kunihito nationalist movement Yama re-entered electoral politics for the first time in centuries (citing the rise in Hulstrian nationalism as the catalyst for their reform as per comments from Yama leader Kei Yoshimura reported in the Miyako Shimbun) and immediately became the leading vote-getter among Kunihito voters. Meanwhile, the standard bearer of Septembrist ideals, the Hosian Democratic Alliance, failed to win any representation in Federal Assembly.

For Union Party organizers, that outcome was proof of structural failure that repeats itself with far greater frequency than should be the case under a functional power-sharing constitutional system. "When your primary outlets for ethnic frustration are parties that want to erase minority languages and a party which cozies up to separatists seeking to exit the shared state altogether, something has gone wrong with the middle," one delegate said at the launch. "We intend to be that middle, but with a clear and actionable constitutional programme."

That programme draws less from Septembrist tradition than from the modern scholarly literature on consociational democracy: power-sharing between organized communities, guaranteed representation, and legally protected autonomy over cultural, linguistic and educational affairs. The party's platform calls for repealing constitutional amendments that enforce integration, restoring cultural autonomy to linguistic and religious communities "regardless of where members of those communities reside," and mandating that Hulstrians, Kunihito and Hulstro-Showans each hold one of the country's three top offices (the Bundespräsident, the Bundeskanzler and the Deputy President) as a matter of constitutional right.

Party figures are careful, however, to distinguish their project from the separatism gaining ground among some Kunihito and Hulstrian nationalists. "We are not proposing that this country come apart into its component peoples," Fukuyama-Weber said. "We are proposing that it stop pretending those peoples don't exist. A house with three or more families under one roof, each with a key to their own room, is still one house."

Aside from its constitutional vision, the Union Party has positioned itself as a proponent of liberal market economics "with a social conscience," backing private property, entrepreneurship and worker ownership alongside corporatist cooperation between labour and management. "Citizens must not only share power, they must share opportunity," one founding member said, "and they must have a sense that their individual and communal prosperity is dependent upon the peace and concord of the peoples."

Whether a party built to hold diverse constituencies, including liberal conservatives, Hosian traditionalists and Daenist socialists from across the cultural spectrum, can itself avoid the fissures it accuses Septembrism of failing to mend is an open question. Moreover, whether the erudite scholar-turned-leader of the Union Party can succeed in capturing voters' attention remains to be seen and is sure to attract future media scrutiny.

The Union Party enters national politics with zero seats in the Federal Assembly and its first real electoral test at least four years out. But its founders speak of the stakes in generational terms. After centuries spent trying to overcome division outright, Fukuyama-Weber and his supporters argue, the country's real task may simply be learning to govern with it.

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The Kiener Zeitung (キエン新聞; Kien Shimbun) is a liberal newspaper published in Kien, Hulstria and Gao-Soto. It is owned by the Kiener Zeitung Publishing Group, a publicly traded company.

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Kei Yoshimura, leader of We Can Become a Mountain, greets supporters after voting at a polling site in her hometown of Miyako, Hilgar.

We Can Become a Mountain Wins Plurality in Federal Assembly After Collapse of Once Dominant Liberal People's Party 
14 May 5740



KIEN, Hulstria - Only about a  year after it was elected the Federal Assembly for the first time in 5740, We Can Become a Mountain (Yama) has soared to become the largest political party in Hulstria and Gao-Soto after receiving over 16 million votes and increasing its seat count in the Federal Assembly by 72, giving it control of over a quarter of all seats.

Impressively, Yama managed to flip all states other than Hulstria proper, including a Budenlar, which is only about 10% Kunihito. It did particularly well in its heartland states of  Kuratha and Hilgar, as well, where it managed to come away with 37.8% and 37% of the vote, respectively.  Polling shows that Yama’s success in this region is tied to its dominant lead among Kunihito and Sekowan voters. In fact, Kunihito nationalist parties did well with this demographic across Hulstria and Gao-Soto, with the combined vote total of Yama and the Cooperative Party reaching a majority among these two ethnic groups.

This is may be a surprising result to many in Hulstria and Gao-Soto, as well as abroad, given that Yama was able to win over such a large portion of the non-Kunihito electorate despite its main premise being decentralization or even independence for Gao-Soto, but Dr. Mori Hayato, a professor at Idōwa National University’s Department of Political Science and Democracy, says that Yama’s electoral success was actually quite predictable. 

“The Liberal People’s Party (LVP), arguably Hulstria and Gao-Soto’s dominant political party, just disbanded only a few weeks ago. And that really only left a few, viable options in the eyes of many voters. Sure, newly formed parties like  the Hosian Democratic Party and Union Party were there, but they had never proven themselves electorally. So, when it came down to it, the Septemberists, moderates, and progressives that formerly voted for the LVP likely coalesced around We Can Become a Mountain as it was the only viable option that didn’t support the Hulstrian Nationalist project or a return to monarchy.” 

In fact, Dr. Mori also argued that the Hulstrian National Party’s decision to support the election of Karl Rothingren-Traugott-Okatori to Federal President may have also pushed some of its voters towards Yama, something that previously may have seemed inconceivable. But, it, along with the Federal Crownlander People’s Party,  ended up being the only two parties to lose seats in the election; they lost 16 and 17 seats respectively.

“It wasn’t too long ago that we saw a few hundred thousand people march through the streets of our country over the election of Mr. Rothingren-Traugott-Okatori and as we saw, many of these protestors were actually former voters of the Hulstrian National Party that felt betrayed by the election of a member of Hulstria and Gao-Soto’s former imperial family to the throne. If support for the republic is high enough on their priority list, than there’s only so many parties for them to turn to.”

As the largest party, Yama will now have to carefully navigate the formation of a government. It is expected that Yama will rule out working with Hulstrian nationalists. As such, the only remaining option is some combination of the Federal Crownlander People’s Party, Cooperative Party, Hosian Democratic Party, and Union Party. However, there’s no certainty that these parties will want to work with Yama, especially with how intertwined it is with the Kunihito nationalist and separatist movement.

[beifengxiaoxiao]

Political Shift in Hulstria and Gao-Soto Signals Rebuttal of Hulstrian Nationalism - For Now

5741.5.13. - MIYAKO -
Author: Yoon Danbi

Reporting live from Miyako, Hulstria and Gao-Soto, GT International News is now confirming that the largest share of the new legislature in that country will go to the left-of-center Yama Party, triumphing over their main adversaries in the Hulstrian National Party. In a stunning reversal of fortunes for the Kunihito-aligned Yama organization, the newly-revitalized community movement has been thrust into the limelight of Hulstrian Gao-Sotoan political life.

The victory was a seeming repudiation against the alarming tide of Hulstrian Nationalism thought to pose a significant force in national politics. Although Yama, a pluralist Kunihito-sympathetic and Septembrist-aligned party, often treads a moderate and reconciliatory if left-of-center tone, their victory was seen by many as a counter against explicitly pro-Hulstrian and Dundorfian-speaking biases. This victory, however, may not be permanent over this Hulstrian Nationalism, which continues to command an impressive presence in the national media and zeitgeist. 

Hulstria and Gao-Soto is a nation whose politics are often characterized by sweeping and socioeconomic sectarian tensions that have historically sometimes broken down into ethnic factionalism. Only time will tell whether the potential new government that may be arranged out of the new parliamentary composition is able to heal those fractures.

As for the Baegukese residents of Hulstria and Gao-Soto, there remain nearly a million KGB citizens in the nation, a fraction of whom maintain legal voting rights. Kyo people in Hulstria and Gao-Soto -  Zaimikuni Kyo, as they are called locally - are frequently cast as a "middleman minority"; often seeming out of place in a society where the Hulstro-Kunihito tensions often dominate loyalties and factionalism. The KGB-backed Baegukese Resident's Association, Shindan (Sindan, 團民臣國拜花大國微在), does not officially endorse political parties and promotes pluralism and independent voting habits.

 Another million more Zaimikuni Kyo are also members of Sōren (Jongryeon, 會合聯綜人忽力伐國微在), or the United Federation of Dranean Residents in Mikuni, a rump organization of the former North Baegukese communist regime. They are seemingly active only in politics to retain their dual privileges, and typically back Gaoic-nationalist and left-wing parties. 

Inside Hulstria and Gao-Soto's Irreverent "Protest Vote", a rare taste of Dissent and Impudence in an Otherwise Orderly Nation
Author: Min Haeoreum, with Klaus Aoyagi

Hulstria and Gao-Soto is stereotyped by Terra as a nation of diligent, detail-oriented, and respectful citizens. Regardless of how true this may be, the typecast was shattered this election by the irreverent protest antics of the so-called "BürgerBund", more formally known as the "Upright Citizen's Association of Mikuni".

Despite the very ironic name, these radicals thrive off of impudence and distaste for the nation's political institutions, mostly dominating social media in brief spurts using street theater. One notable episode from the electoral campaign saw a Jippie, as BurgerBund supporters are called, throw a pie at the face of Anna-Sofie von Baumann, candidate of the Hulstro-Nationalist HNP party. 

The Jippies, mostly young urban and often affluent university students, present these outrageous acts as a way to reveal the insanity of the current political system and attract attention for the BürgerBund 's politics. Despite their ironic commitment to the Kunihito-centric ideology of Ibarism, which advocates for a culturally Kunihito Hulstria and Gao-Soto administered under social justice and remittance programs for indigenous and native People of Color, most Jippies are in fact young Hulstrians and Hulstro-Showans by ethnicity, who are said to get a rise out of fighting the system.

As of now, the party has no war chest, no official nominations for office besides the occasional write-in, and includes many outright abstentionists who refuse to vote or even recognize the electoral system. Likened to perennial joke candidates in other parliamentary democracies, the BürgerBund are seen as an unserious alternative.

GT International correspondent Klaus Aoyagi, who has experience covering Hulstria and Gao-Soto's elections, has the following to contribute:

Frau Weissmann's party, the BürgerBund, are generally disliked and considered offensive by nearly everyone in the Hulstrian-Gao-Sotoan electorate. They're more known for pulling pranks and insulting aspiring legislators than demonstrating concrete, serious policy programs. At their best they're mostly seen as far-left radical university activists who make a scene too much. At their worst, a bunch of undisciplined and rude pranksters fresh out of the college dorms trying to pass their misdeeds and social anarchy off as political activism.

Despite being seen as not serious, when I spoke to her earlier she and the party leadership remained quite adamant that their unorthodox methods are in service of what they hope will bloom into a social movement to reckon with the harmful and controversial past of this nation.

They'll have to wait quite a bit - exit polls are showing the party likely picked up less than 0.1% of the national vote, and will seemingly remain on the far left fringes of national politics for the foreseeable future. Still, an impressive showing for what appears to be the most unlikely alliance of radical activists, university students, counter-cultural beatniks, and college yucksters.
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