I'm very sorry to hear that, Phoenix, but yes, it is indeed in the mornings. Ah well - as you say, such is life. Thank you for organising the Royal Navy for us, I'm sure it will be much appreciated by whoever takes over.
We'd be very glad to have you, Hannibal. The Byzantines are alive and well, with roughly their pre-Manzikert borders - Anatolia plus the Balkans south of the Danube, and some insignificant colonies. (As an aside, in a recent perusal of the situation I noticed to my surprise that Norway owns a couple of useless Pacific islands, which I acquired in a colonial trade with Byz that smoothed out some borders elsewhere, and promptly forgot about.) In the recent liquidation of Italy, they also acquired the eastern seaboard of the peninsula, returning the Roman Empire to its home for the
first time in more than a thousand years. The Eternal City, however, is in Burgundian hands. I can't tell from outside, but I strongly suspect that Skar has a serious problem with getting rares.
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In speaking of the political parties of the Yngling Ting, it is worth remembering that these were not formal organisations with membership dues and a fixed voter base; rather, they were ideological or philosophical umbrellas, a convenient shorthand by which a candidate could identify his position on a few issues. There was no party discipline as in the British Parliament; Tingsmenn voted their conscience on any and all issues. Conversely, there was no question of party funding or backing being
required for an election; if you wished to stand as, say, a Radical, then you did so. The occasional attempt to game this system by splitting an opposing party's vote was held in check partly by the threat of retaliation in kind, partly by run-off elections between the two most popular candidates, and partly by that all-purpose Yngling check-and-balance, the duel. Nevertheless, the parties were just sufficiently
coherent that it was possible to speak of a government being composed of, say, Moderates. Each individual Cabinet position (including that of King, although as a lifetime position the kingship was a special case) was chosen by a simple majority of the Ting; a coalition, therefore, could be formed by horse-trading with several different parties, without binding anyone to support the government against a motion of no confidence. Like so much of the Yngling system, the parties had grown organically and worked more because people both believed that they did, and wanted them to, rather than for any intrinsic elegance or good design. With this in mind, we can examine the chief parties of the 1930s:
- Radicals: In a sense the oldest political party in Norway. Stemming from the loss of Holstein around 1700, Radicals stand for the most uncompromising formulations of Yngling mysticism. With their rhetoric of superiority, belief in the power of raw Will to overcome all obstacles (often accompanied, it is true, by a fanatic dedication to the discipline and training that make Yngling superiority a battlefield reality), and disdain for all strils as subhumans to be subjugated, Radicals are the caricature that foreign newspapers reach for when they want to present Norway in an unfriendly light. However, although the stril-hating, firebreathing Radical certainly exists, he is by no means a dominant force; the party draws its support mainly from conservative landholders in the backwoods of Scandinavia, where the realities of the industrial age have yet to penetrate.
- White Christ's Army: Competing with the Radicals for the votes of backwoods districts, these are conservative Christians who strongly oppose the neopagan/atheist makeup of modern Yngling society. It's worth noting that the Yngling version of Christianity belongs rather more to the Old Testament than the New. It is a warrior creed for a warrior people, and if the truth were told, has always lain rather thinly over the old pagan customs. In spite of their name, it is the Lord God Jehovah of the Hosts, and not the gentle White Christ, that the Christians of Norway worship.
- Ynglinga Lag: The party of the law-Ynglings, those former strils and their descendants who were made Ynglings in the aftermath of the Twenty Years' War. Although this averted a huge rebellion and civil war on top of the disaster of the Burgundian invasion, it could not give social status to factory workers and small farmers - only rights in law. A thousand years of hereditary privilege is not undone at the stroke of a pen, and the law-Ynglings still find that, in competition for army rank or business opportunity, they just aren't quite as good as the blood-Ynglings. Eventually, time and intermarriage will blur the distinction; but for now, the law-Ynglings organise themselves for advantage. Their name combines the old sense of 'lag', to mean 'law', with the new sense of 'association'.
- Liberals: A tiny minority who want to give legal protection (as opposed to customary privileges), or even votes, to the strils. Usually, but not always, this is associated with a fairly peaceful view of foreign policy.
- Moderates, a catch-all designation for pragmatic men who want to get on with the business of governing an empire, without necessarily steering it in any particular ideological direction. Naturally, this makes them something of an umbrella party, and they dominate most governments simply by virtue of being able to find compromises in all directions. Howeer, their share of the vote has been decreasing as the Ynglings seek ideological solutions to Norway's problems.
At the moment, the government is a coalition of the Moderates and the Ynglinga Lag, with the former dominating.