July 13, 2013

                                


Commentary for July 13, 2013:

A "quick" refresher on Sol system politics and the importance of Jupiter to the Terran Union. The Jupiter Alliance is governed by a provisional government, formed by the leadership of the Jovian separatists, who rose up against the Martian Confederate Republic, of which the Jovian moons were colonies, and won independence from Mars with the help of Earth at the start of the Earth-Mars War in 3240. Prior to that, Jupiter was treated as an experiment in unbridled capitalism, with very little regulation and no representative government to fix its problems, ultimately resulting in a small cabal of Martian corporations pretty much running the entire planetary system, while the Martian military put down any protests to the way things were run. Because of this, the resistance had a strongly leftist bent to it and the provisional government has been, essentially, a socialist government, which has nationalised pretty much all Jovian industry.

Addendum for October 3, 2019:

So, yes, it would seem odd that the leader of a socialist government would pick the moderate centrist party candidate to throw his support behind. It could be for the lofty reasons Caradoc has given (he did idolise Merlin, after all), but it could have also been simple politics. The Social Democrats form a sizeable opposition in the United Earth Parliament, and without their continuing support for unification, the whole process could fall apart. By supporting their candidate for President, Merlin may have been hoping to present Jovians as more moderate than they had hitherto appeared, so as to not frighten Social Democratic parliamentarians into voting against unification. But since he’s dead, I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Of course, not everyone on Jupiter is a socialist, like Caradoc says. Indeed, there are plenty of people who are very angry with the extreme leftist leanings of the provisional government; this is most true of wealthier individuals, who are now being hit with very high taxes (having previously had to pay basically nothing), but there are also centrists or moderate leftists who simply feel that Jupiter's socialist government has gone too far in the other direction to what things used to be like under the previous corporate rule. So, there is plenty of support on the Jovian moons for the Social Democrats, even if most Jovians will be voting Progressive.

And, of course, in order to bring the format of the earlier chapters into line with Chapter 7 onwards, I’ve made an updated version of this page, which is larger, with clearer text. Hopefully, this will make the earlier chapters easier to read.


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