//------------------------------//
// Switching Horses Midstream, Chapter VI 
// Story: Selections From the Canterlot Royal Academic Archives 
// by Third Wave 
//------------------------------//


For Want of a Nail the Horseshoe Was Lost

by Writ Drop
The Dark Horse Candidate Vol. 27, Issue 5
Whinnypeg University Press


The Platina Party’s decision to break from the Tricrowners nearly took down Fancy Pants’s government right then and there. It certainly had the means to. The Tricrowners in total had 111 seats in parliament at the time, and the Platina Party made up 12 of those seats in the unicorn reserved ridings. If every member of the Platinards had gone along with Noblesse’s break, the Triple Crown Party would have lost its majority straight away. Fortunately for Fancy Pants, however, he was able to convince three Unicorn MPs to stick with the party. Quondam from Ponyville-Everfree, Amicus Brief from Canterlot Castle, and Verbatim from Canterlot-University stuck with the Tricrowners through the split. While this kept the Tricrowner majority intact, remaining with the governing party isolated the three from the rest of the Unicorn MPs. Now the unicorn riding contingent of the Horseshoe was nearly universally against Fancy Pants and the Triple Crown government except for those three. Despite this, it did allow Fancy Pants’s regency to hold on for some time longer and derailed Noblesse Oblige’s attempt to immediately and dramatically bring down Fancy Pants’ government.

The Triple Crown government managed to limp along in its bare majority for a couple more months. As Princess Twilight Sparkle officially began the royal transition of power, Fancy Pants was still able to pass a few bills to help the succession along in its early stages. But by August, the knives were out for the Fancy Pants government. With only three defections or no confidence votes from the Tricornwers needed to take down the government, every party, whether in parliament or not, was wheeling and dealing in the Horseshoe to try and peel off a member of the Tricrowners for themselves. Any defection at this point would be high profile and give a boost to the gaining party’s recognition. The first success at whittling down the majority came from southern Equestria in the scrubland between the Ghastly Gorge and the San Palomino Desert. Caprock, MP for Grulla-Palomino Canyon, flipped from the Triple Crown Party to the Coronists after he claimed the Tricrowners in Canterlot were failing to uphold the government’s support for the region. It was a fairly general complaint about Fancy Pants’s governance, citing a number of different grievances from earth ponies of the area about the lack of promised rain and the increased dragon migrations through southern Equestria creating animosity between rock farmers and dragons in the region. The defection could have been a quick second buck to the Tricrowner’s hopes of prolonging their majority, but it was in the early days of their decline. Caprock, perhaps out of a sense of cockiness or from a remaining sense of dedication to Equestrian political norms, opted to stand in a by-election as the politeness and decorum among elected officials called for after a defection. The Triple Crown Party stood local rancher Amaretto to replace Caprock. A straight two-horse race would have likely seen Caprock gallop to re-election given the popularity of the Coronists in neighboring Salt Lick City and Arimaspia, but the Hippocrats also entered the by-election seeking any chance they could find of gaining a further hoofhold in parliament. The Grulla-Palomino Canyon by-election then became a tight three-horse race. The presence of both the Coronists and Hippocrats divided the opposition vote and the Hippocrats peeled off some of the more hardline voters who would have otherwise gone to the Coronists. Floydalia pulled off about 16 percent of the vote for the Hippocrats, but Amaretto ultimately unseated Caprock by a margin of just 3 percent, winning with under 45 percent in a riding that the year before gave Caprock a comfortable majority as a Tricrowner. Amaretto’s win saved the seat for the Tricrowners and kept them at their bare majority of 102 seats. However, the close race indicated that the downturn in Tricrowner support was not just a phenomenon among unicorns or among the haughty Canterlot elite, but was happening across Equestria and among every type of pony. Even if southwestern Equestria was already one of the stronger areas for the Coronists and the Party to Uphold Hippocracy, the trickle of support away from the government had evidently not been satiated by the Platina Party jumping ship.

The Grulla-Palomino Canyon by-election was a sigh of relief for the Tricrowners after the Platina Party’s disaffiliation, but it was short-lived. Soon after, two opportunities arose in quick succession to continue chipping away at their majority. The Cloudsdale local elections had a few notable faces running including a fair number of members of parliament. Perhaps seeing which way the wind was blowing, some Tricrowners decided to make a move to Cloudsdale politics rather than settling for being in the opposition in Canterlot or trying to fly for reelection facing a headwind. Three Triple Crown MPs tried to make the jump. Brazen Sunset ran for mayor of Cloudsdale, and Barnstorm and Chequered Sky ran for city council. Chequered Sky lost the council race and stayed on as an MP, but both Brazen Sunset and Barnstorm won their races, triggering by-elections for their parliamentary ridings. In Cloudsdale East & Moazagotl, the Triple Crown Party ran water rights attorney Hadley Cell and was able to hold on to Brazen Sunset’s seat thanks to a divide among the opposition candidates and the recently founded New Pegasopolis Party coming in second over the Coronists. They were not so lucky in Barnstorm’s former riding of Cirral and Firkinhead. Cirral and Firkinhead encompasses much of Cloudsdale’s reservoir district so naturally the impact of the southern droughts and water supply issues were of utmost importance to by-election voters. Unfortunately for Fancy Pants, the government’s attempts to increase cloud production to alleviate the drought had not gone over well on the supply side of the equation. Pegasi weather workers, particularly in the distillation and condensation factories, had heard the news of Princess Twilight breaking the streetsweeper strike in Canterlot before the Swanifying and were worried attempts to increase production would mean similar action against any similar behavior by Cloudsdale workers. Additionally, a resolution in parliament to petition Celestia and Luna to seek foreign aid or temporary workers from Griffonstone as what government officials called “emergency measures” as a short term cloud production boost angered many in the cloud manufacturing-heavy riding. Despite Cloudsdale’s tendency to be more friendly to other creatures and foreign relations than elsewhere in Equestria, one area the pegasi can be quite protective about is the cloudmaking industry. The idea of seeking aid or more workers to help out with cloud production, especially the idea of asking a relatively poorer country like Griffonstone for help in such matters, was a direct affront to Cloudsdalians’ pride in their main industry. So from the start, Foggy Bottom was facing a galeforce headwind in her campaign to replace Barnstorm and keep the seat in Triple Crown hooves. Adding to the government’s woes, the New Pegasopolis Party found a very strong candidate of their own in Laserjet, a retired Wonderbolt. Laserjet used her prior career and her party capitalizing on the Griffonstone aid issue to promote its idea of restoring pegasi self-governance and influence in government and doomed the Triple Crown Party’s attempt to keep the seat. The government was now down to 101 seats in parliament, and pegasus politics suddenly had a new player, the New Pegasopolis Party.

The New Pegasopolis Party was one of a hoofful of fringe political parties that had been created or which had shifted their platforms in the previous year. These new parties developed primarily out of the increasing tensions between unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi in the aftermath of the Cozy Glow Crisis and the Sombric Insurrection. The NPP, headed by Laserjet and Bonnie Blue, called for the separation of pegasi into their own sovereign country outside of Equestria and a “return to the proud, independent pegasi culture of Pegasopolis” before the days of the Two Sisters. While they became the main focus of the pegasi nationalist movement after Laserjet won the by-election, they were not the only ones. The Cloudsdale Independence Party also promoted pegasus separatism, but in a more limited scope of independence for just Cloudsdale. While the two parties agreed on the broader scope of seeking independence for Cloudsdale, they differed greatly in other areas of policy. The CIP in fact aligned more with the Everfree Party than the NPP in terms of policy, calling a broader coalition of pegasi, bat ponies, griffons, and other flying folk united under the banner of an independent Cloudsdalian identity. The NPP, on the other hoof, ran with the undercurrent of xenophobia and distrust that seemed to be slowly building in Equestria. The NPP’s call for a broader pegasi identity and not one based on modern Cloudsdale tapped into the Equestria-wide frustration among pegasi and not just in Cloudsdale around the weather production issues and the perceived unfair demands being made by earth ponies and the Horseshoe in Canterlot on weatherponies. That sentiment helped the party expand beyond just local Cloudsdale politics to gain a hoofhold with pegasi across Equestria and propelled the party’s support that led to its first member of parliament being from a general riding, even if it was still a Cloudsdale riding.

Laserjet and the NPP may have been the first, but they weren’t the only nationalist party gaining clout. Just as political thought among pegasi was edging toward nationalism, so too were earth ponies and unicorns. The Earth First Coalition, also formed in the past two years, was a group even more radical than the Free Soil Party in calling for earth ponies to have a greater say over cloud distribution and weather policy. While the Free Soilers merely adopted thermalism in their weather policy platform, the Earth First Coalition went so far as to spread a false conspiracy theory that pegasi were deliberately stalling cloud distribution in order to weaken the influence of earth ponies, and called for pegasi to be completely removed from weather management altogether. Earth Firsters called for the separation of earth ponies from Equestria to “take back the land” from the pegasi. Of course, this put them at odds with the New Pegasopolitans and the Cloudsdale Independence Party, even moreso than they were with the other more mainstream parties.

Unicorns were not without their own branding of a nationalist political party on the rise, but in the unicorns’ case it was a shift in platform of an already existing party. The Party to Uphold Hippocracy ostensibly claimed to be a voice for ponies of all types in its platform and in speeches, but it frequently performed best and gained seats in largely unicorn populated districts or in unicorn reserved ridings. The party had tried to broaden its appeal, but as the Corona Party shifted to become more extreme on a number of issues as Equestria leapt from crisis to crisis, the Coronists encroached more and more on the Hippocrats’ voter base. To make themselves stand out from the Coronists then, Jacobalt and the Hippocrats embraced even more extremist ideas including unicorn supremacy. To a certain extent, the idea had already been present in the party. The Hippocrats’ unicorn affiliate party, the Unicorn Restorationist Bloc, had already embraced much of the more radical wing of the party with its advocacy for reclaiming control of the movements of the sun and moon to the unicorn population from Celestia and Luna and the belief that unicorn magic gave them inherent superiority over pegasi and earth ponies as the pre-Equestrian unicorn aristocracy supposedly demonstrated. Jacobalt and other Hippocrats previously always claimed that while they would not forbid the URB from affiliating with the Hippocrats, the party as a whole did not stand for such policies and stood for the defense of all ponies. Meanwhile, the URB took this stance as a quiet endorsement of their selection of unicorn reserved candidates. Since winning two more unicorn-heavy ridings in the 1008 election, and with the Sombric Insurrection and the increased attacks on Fancy Pants, however, the Hippocrats have more openly embraced its affiliation to the Unicorn Restorationist Bloc.

The increased number and visibility of nationalist parties was certainly a sign of growing extremism in Equestrian politics, but it was now the only one. Not all the more extremist new parties are nationalists or associated with any one group of ponies. The Golden Dawn Party began in a similar way to the New Pegasopolis Party in Cloudsdale politics before branching out into contesting general ridings. In fact, it did so before the NPP, though it failed to win any ridings at first unlike the New Pegasopolitans. The Golden Dawn Party though only began as part of pegasus politics thanks to its founder, Burning Bright, being a pegasus. It was not a separatist or autonomist party. It was quite the opposite, indeed harkening more along the lines of Whinnypeg’s very own Nightmare Party. The Golden Dawn Party saw the conspiratorial accusations that Fancy Pants was a willing participant in the Sombric Insurrection and, instead of dismissing them out of hoof as ridiculous as any reasonable pony would do, embraced them wholeheartedly. They desire the disbanding of parliament as an institution and a return to absolute Celestial monarchical rule, as if Princess Luna was still stuck in her prison on the moon.

The foundation and relative rise of these extremist parties was a troubling sign for Equestria, not just for their potential threat to the Triple Crown majority but for what they embodied for Equestrian ideological movements. As much as anypony can disagree with the Tricrowners or the Coronists or the Everfree Party, at least they were mostly in support of maintaining a unified Equestria and royal sovereigns whose excesses are held in check by a representative, elected body. The rise of separatist and authoritarian parties signaled a drastic change in social and political norms that was sliding toward dangerous territory for the country.

After Laserjet won the Cirral & Firkinhead by-election, it seemed only a matter of time before the next domino fell. When Weather and Cloud Services Minister Ice Crystal resigned after another consecutive month of poor cloud production numbers, there was some speculation among political insiders that she would resign from parliament altogether and trigger yet another by-election. The rumors passed as Ice Crystal chose to continue representing Tall Tale-Crescent Moon Bay, and a potential Tricrowner loss was avoided there. The next loss for the Tricrowners would instead come a month later. Potatoskr, an earth pony who sat in the northwest Equestrian general riding of Ponytello-Craters of the Moon, was in a traditionally safe seat for the Triple Crown Party. The rural seat was a rather remote area even for that part of Equestria, with little soil and primarily basalt terrain pocked with scrub making it not a lively area for trade or agriculture. What settlements there were were primarily earth ponies, making what living they could off farming the rarer obsidian that was to be found in the caves and rock. However, those factors did make it an attractive location for batponies looking for a quieter place to move after Hollow Shades and Whinnypeg became more developed. The Craters of the Moon area, so called because from a pegasus eye view the jagged, grey landscape brought to mind the pocked surface of the moon during Nightmare Moon’s imprisonment, saw an influx of batpony migration to the region, quickly altering the demographics of the area. Potatoskr survived the 1008 snap election by a decent margin over the Coronists and the Nightmare Party, but the Triple Crown Party saw a drop of support in the region of over ten percent from the previous election. Potatoskr apparently concluded the problem was the growing dislike of the Tricrowners in the area and, even though he was still likely to lose in the next election, decided he would fare better without the party label dragging him down. Potatoskr switched to an independent, bringing the Tricrowners down to an even 100 seats. In a notable break from normal decorum, Potatoskr did not resign his seat to stand in a by-electoin. None of the Platina Party members had before him, but they claimed they were merely disaffiliating the party as a whole from the Tricrowners and not actually switching political parties. Potatoskr did not even offer that as an excuse, even though he could have since he was becoming an independent and not switching to another party. The only response from Potatoskr on whether he would stand in a by-election was simple: “I’m sure there will be an election for me to stand in soon enough.”

The Tricrowners now had an even half of the Horseshoe, but it still counted as a majority thanks to the centuries old precedent of ties being broken in the government’s favor. The established rule had been that ties would be broken by Princess Celestia, but with the Tricornwers having controlled government for so long and being in step with Celestia on nearly all issues, the precedent eventually developed so the formal assent from Celestia was not needed and a tied vote was de facto sufficient to be in favor of the Cheval Regent’s opinion. However, with a hair-thin majority, the murmurs of a no confidence vote in the government had gained so much speed they were nearing a full gallop. If all the opposition parties joined together to try and force an election with a confidence vote, they would only need one Tricrowner MP to buck the governing party and join them. Parties on both sides of the Horseshoe were eager for an election. Before a vote could be held though, the final nail in the current Tricrowner majority was driven in; or rather, Nail was driven out. Rusty Nail, MP for Neighbraska-Oatmaha West and an earth pony who had lobbied hard in parliament for a more thermalist approach to weather management by the government, spoke out against the replacement of Ice Crystal with Black Sun as Weather Minister after Ice Crystal’s resignation. The replacement of a unicorn with a pegasus during an irrigation cloud shortage was a slap in the face to many earth ponies, even if Fancy Pants did have the best of intentions.

The reasoning for moving Black Sun to Weather in the minor cabinet shuffle was that Black Sun was from Las Pegasus Center at the heart of southwestern Equestria closer to where some of the worst of the dry conditions were. More importantly, Black Sun was a productivist when it came to cloud management. While the most common arguments over weather management are between the competing philosophies of precipitism or top-down peagsi management and thermalism or bottom-up earth pony management, the pegasi still have competing views on cloud production and weather distribution among themselves, even if on a broad platform they are mostly precipitists. The cloudservationist versus productivist debate in weather management dates from when pegasi were still in full seasonal councils and remains one of the major issues within pegasus politics. The summer council and now Estival Party promote cloudservationism for a drier climate with less cloud production to conserve water resources, meaning weather factory workers have less workload and less rainwater is needed and reservoir stockpiles can be kept at higher levels. Productivism, in contrast pushed by the winter council and now the Hibernal Party, adopts a philosophy of using all resources at Equestria’s disposal for weather production, pushing for wetter summers and snowier winters with denser cloud production to build up the natural snowpack in the high mountains. Most pegasi with ties outside of strictly pegasus politics, especially those in Cloudsdale working directly in the weather industry, tend to be cloudservationists. Black Sun, however, is an exception, which is why Fancy Pants chose her to replace Ice Crystal. A productivist with ties to the southwest and who knew firsthoof the effects of the post-Cozy Glow drought conditions could hopefully talk some sense into the Cloudsdale holdouts and ramp up cloud production for the coming winter and build the snowpack so at least the next spring and summer would not be so harsh.

Despite the government’s intentions, many earth ponies, particularly those in the middle of Equestria far from Las Pegasus, did not appreciate what Black Sun might be able to bring to the negotiating table and only saw the appointment of a pegasus at a time when thermalism was clearly needed in directing Cloudsdale’s production facilities. Several earth ponies MPs were upset with Fancy Pants’ decision, but Rusty Nail was the first to bolt from the party entirely. Rusty Nail joined the Coronists with a warm welcome from Parabellum.

Ninety-nine. Fancy Pants, who had commanded a majority of 23 seats just a year and a few months ago, now saw his regency without a majority in parliament and now presided over the first time the Tricrowners had lost a majority in anycreature’s living memory, the Two Sisters notwithstanding. The collapse of the Tricrowners under Fancy Pants was nothing short of tragic when it seemed to be going harmoniously after the return of Princess Luna and the restoration of the diarchy a decade ago. Even with most of the invasions of Equestria that followed, while they chipped away at ponies’ trust in the Triple Crown Party, Fancy Pants and the Tricrowners had been able to maintain the high level of support the Tricrowners had received for so long and looked like they might be able to recover. Now though, all that was in shambles, and a further trial was looming with a new election highly likely if they could not scramble to put some sort of coalition together.

A coalition to actually build a majority in the Horseshoe was unprecedented, but it should have been easy to pull off. After all, how hard should it be to get a party with at least two members to join them. The Everfree Party had been partial to the Tricrowners and had expressed interest in a coalition during the snap election the year before. It turned out that Portwine’s coalition offer was only made because it could be an empty gesture. The Everfree Party may have had leverage now, but Fancy Pants and Portwine were unable to find an agreement. The attempt to thread the needle between the earth pony and pegasus demands on weather management only served to alienate the parties of both to the point that even the appointment of Black Sun was not enough to convince the Hibernal Party to join the Tricrowners in forming a government. Every opposition party in the Horseshoe saw the writing on the wall and was eager to grab as much of the pie that they could. Even the Black Angus Party was hoping for an election now, eyeing a second non-pony reserved riding now that the Triple Crown Party was vulnerable. As Rusty Nail settled in with the Coronists in the Horseshoe, a motion of no confidence was brought to the floor. For the first time in years, the Triple Crown Party stood entirely alone in its vote. A no confidence vote against Fancy Pants passed the Horseshoe 101 votes to 99. For the second time in two years, election season was on.

The initial polling to kick off the campaign period showed just how far the Triple Crown Party and trust in the government slid. Already the Tricrowners had hit a net disapproval rating, with 45% disapproving of the government’s recent performance to 43% approval. Their polls continued to slide during the first weeks of the election campaign. Parties on both wings took advantage of the message that a no confidence vote sent in order to peel off ex-Tricrowner voters in their respective directions. Parabellum and the Coronist candidates spoke constantly about how Fancy Pants’s regency over the past two decades had only led to Equestria growing weaker “from its borders to its heart,” and that Equestria had faced unprecedented levels of crisis and instability under Fancy Pants. Where the Coronists did admit Fancy Pants had made positive decisions in government, namely in the initial appointment of Neighsay “before he went soft” and on increasing national security measures following the Sombric Insurrection, the Coronists claimed full credit for those decisions. The Party to Uphold Hippocracy took the rhetoric even further. During the 1009 election, the Unicorn Restorationist Bloc began wielding its increasing sway over the Hippocrats. They blamed Equestria’s recent perceived weakness not just on Equestria opening her borders to foreign trade and to other creatures. The Hippocrats also began lambasting the infighting between the earth ponies and pegasi over the weather. Jacobalt claimed the earth ponies were hoarding food to make pegasi look like they were deliberately shortening the cloud supply but at the same time claimed pegasi were halting production so they could shirk their duty to society and to Equestria.

At the other end of the Horseshoe, the Everfree Party was equally blaming Tricrowners for centralizing production and not creating enough distributed cloud storage in regional centers so local and regional areas could handle local weather shocks themselves. The Estival Party, while they were a more liberal party, even jumped into the stampede of attacks on the Tricrowners despite the Estival Party only running in pegasus reserved ridings and so not directly running against any Triple Crown Party candidates. Estival leader Lemon Shandy blamed the delay in weather management and looming drought on the previous years of cloud overproduction and overuse and a lack of cloudservation in recent years. The Hibernal Party’s victories in Cloudsdale weather board positions in recent years had led to more productivist influence in weather management decisions at both the local and national levels, but meteorological estimates had not shown any supply shock this bad in the forecasts and certainly had not predicted the Cozy Glow Crisis and the magic outage. The Tricrowners were beset on all sides by their opponents, and they slipped badly in the polls through the end of the month when they hit as low as 23 percent. Analysis of the polling showed that many different parties were sapping the strength from the Tricornwers, but being the largest opposition party, the biggest benefactor of the government’s polling freefall was the Coronists who saw the most steady climb in polling during this time.

The Coronists were improving so much in the polls that they even briefly ran ahead of the Tricrowners. In the 1008 election, the Coronists had led one Mareist poll right before election day, but this was the first time that all three major pollsters had the Coronists ahead for a consistent period. Equinnipiac even had the Coronists polling at over ten points ahead of the Tricrowners in two successive polls.. The Coronists' rhetoric on a need for stability and national security resonated with many ponies after the revelation of the Tree of Harmony and its destruction during the Sombric Insurrection. However, that rhetoric would prove to be their undoing in the campaign. Many ponies were concerned about a drastic change in leadership during a time when a new crisis seemed likely and a royal succession was imminent. A change in Cheval Regent right as Princess Twilight was ascending the throne, plus swapping control of parliament from the party that had led the Horseshoe for over a millennium for one that had never held control of parliament during its centuries of existence, struck ponies as inviting an unnecessary level of instability to Equestria. As soon as polling showed that the Coronists had the support to potentially win control of parliament, many ponies got skittish about the change in leadership and backed off their support for the Coronists.

Although they backed off from the Coronists, voters didn't just swing back to the Triple Crown Party. The Coronists’ lead in the polls showed that the Tricrowners were even more vulnerable than they initially seemed and were in fact beatable by an opposition party. Ponies who perhaps did not prefer either the Coronists or the Tricrowners but had tactically chosen either party now saw their options of viable parties to support greatly increase. With the government party shown to be beatable, it turned out many ponies wanted their preferred opposition party to be the one to topple the Tricrowners instead of settling for the Coronists. These voters began coalescing around other minor parties instead of either major party. Two weeks after the Coronists broke through into the lead, their numbers had tumbled again with the Tricrowners taking back the top spot. The overall polling for the Tricrowners saw a bounce for a day or two, but afterward slid further compared to where they had been before.

For all the noise about the no confidence vote and the barbs traded by parties on all sides, the end of the campaign was relatively quiet. There was no last minute gamble by the Triple Crown Party trotting out Twilight Sparkle or the Princesses this time in order to save their flagging poll numbers. There was no surprise crisis to upend all the issues on ponies’ muzzles. Polling in the last days of the election was all over the place for who would be the second and third place parties, and with ridings elected by first past the post it was a complete tossup on which party would end up leading in dozens of ridings. Creatures across Equestria were too rapt with the question of what exactly would happen to the partisan system now that the Triple Crown Party had fallen this far. It was a rather unremarkable end to the campaign period, but preceded a historic result in the election.

Despite the disastrous turn for the Triple Crown Party’s support throughout Equestria, the party still ended up in first in both seats and in the popular vote. It was still a precarious drop from the previous election and was a display of just how fractured Equestrian political views had become. In the previous year’s snap election the Tricrowners won over 30% of the total votes across all general and reserved ridings, but in this year’s election they carried just over 22% of the total popular vote. This was largely due to their collapse in the unicorn reserved ridings from 1.3 million votes to barely 200,000 with the Platina Party taking most of the ex-Tricrowner vote. Even in the general ridings though, the Triple Crown Party vote fell by over six percent to just 31.4%.

The collapse of the Tricrowners led to most other parties seeing significant bumps in their vote share. The split between the Tricrowners and Platina Party spurred the Coronists to become the leading party in the unicorn ridings in terms of the popular vote. Even so, the Coronists still saw their overall vote share fall to below 20 percent as other parties made larger gains. Both the Everfree Party and the Party to Uphold Hippocracy rose to over 10 percent of the overall popular vote. The now unaffiliated Platina Party and the New Pegasopolis Party both upset the carts in the unicorn and pegasus reserved ridings as the Platina Party won over 1 million votes while the Pegasopolitans received over half a million votes combined from their general and pegasus reserved candidates. In the pegasus ridings the Vernal Party took off as well, displacing the Hibernal Party for the second place spot in the pegasus ridings. The earth pony and non-pony ridings did not see too much movement compared to the others. The Free Soil Party did jump to over 20 percent of the earth pony vote and the Everfree Party actually lost votes compared to 1008 in the earth pony ridings, though mainly that was due to the relative success of the more extremist Earth First Party. The non-pony ridings did see a marked increase in votes going to the Black Angus Party and the Blankists as trust in the Tricrowners to maintain the level of rights and protections for non-ponies fell after increased tensions among griffons, dragons, and changelings following the Sombric Insurrection and the pony backlash to the foreign trade agreements. The Tricrowner share of the non-pony vote fell by over 10 percent from 1008, while the Black Angus Party reached over 20 percent of the vote for the first time in its history. The Blankist Equalist Party received a sizable number of votes as well, especially among griffons, though with only five non-pony ridings they were spread too thin to make a dent in any of the individual ridings.

Leading in the popular vote was little consolation for Fancy Pants and the Tricrowners, as they suffered by far the most losses of any party. The Tricornwers lost a whopping 28 seats from their standings going into the election campaign. All but one of those losses were in general ridings; Verbatim, the Unicorn MP for Canterlot-University, was unseated by Brass Buckle, the Coronist candidate. The worst losses for the Tricrowners were in northeastern Equestria and in the Unicorn Range. In the northeast the Tricrowners lost half their seats, collapsing from 20 of the region’s 33 ridings to just 10, leaving them with less than a third of the ridings in the region.The Coronists taking back Stable Island after just a year was not too much of a surprise, but the Tricrowners were also swept out of the Griffish Isles seats by the Everfree Party. Fillybrand was swept up in the wave against the Tricrowners in Ponyonta, and to add insult to injury both there and in Ceffyldigion, another Everfree gain, the Tricornwers fell from first place in 1008 to third! The Everfreers and Coronists both took the top two finishes in those ridings.

In the Unicorn Range, the damage done to the Tricrowners was perhaps even worse than the northeast even though it was a smaller number of ridings at stake. The Unicorn Range had already been one of the growing hotbeds of Coronist and Hippocrat support in recent years. The Tricrowners only held half of the region’s eight ridings after the 1008 election. In 1008 it was where the Hippocrats made their second breakthrough in the general ridings with Ruby Ridge’s victory in Bitterroot. But in 1009, resentment against the government and its trade policies continued to escalate as local pushback against the dragon immigration to the region caused by the mineral rights agreement with the Dragonlands. The tensions between the largely unicorn and earth pony miners and the incoming dragon prospectors frequently boiled over into both physical and legal fights. By the time of the election, the ponies in the Unicorn Range had had enough. The Triple Crown Party was completely wiped out of the Unicorn Range and, next to the Canterlot suburbs, it was where the Party to Uphold Hippocracy made its biggest gains. The Hippocrats not only held onto Bitterroot by a double digit margin, they also defeated the Tricrowners in the Rocin Mountain Range riding and even picked a seat off the Coronists in Equusferrous. The win in Equusferrous was particularly noteworthy with Sterling Price as the Hippocratic candidate there. Sterling was one of the more notably Unicorn Restorationist leaning Hippocratic nominees in the general ridings, and had been a top adviser to Carbuncle in Unicornia Centre for years before running on his own. During the campaign Sterling gained notoriety for playing up a limp at speeches, alleging he had lost it during a skirmish with the dragon that briefly settled in the caves of the Smokey Mountains in 1001. Sterling’s victory over Algoma in Equusferrous was one example of how far the Hippocrats had risen. More than just a fringe spoiler party for the Coronists, they were now both willing and capable of defeating the Coronists on their own turf.

While the losses were not as bad for the Tricrowners in the rest of Equestria, they still came out of the 1009 election practically in freefall. They plummeted to just 65 of the 135 general ridings, less than half of the general seats and far below what they needed to even start reasonably building a coalition government. Counting the reserved ridings, the Tricrowners came out of the election with only 71 out of 200 seats in the Horseshoe. Still, they were in the best position to form a coalition since the Coronists only had 43 seats in total. However, the political shocks over the past year had made any party aligning with the Tricornwers a shaky proposition. Even the single seat held by the Black Angus Party, which would have previously jumped at the chance to have a say in a governing coalition, was now an uncertainty in formation talks thanks to being represented by the firebrand young calf Arizona. The first and most important step though was going to be convincing the Everfree Party. With its rise to 17 ridings, the party now held a crucial amount of power and would have been a vital part of any Tricrowner coalition government. And there was initial hope by many both in the government and in the media for the Everfree Party to be open to a coalition. In the previous year’s campaign, Portwine had said the Everfree Party would be open to entering a coalition with the Tricrowners if the Tricrowners did not retain a majority. Furthermore, some Everfreers both in the Horseshoe and public supporters voiced support for a Triple Crown-Everfree joint effort as a foundational base for a wider coalition. Even if the Everfree Party did join, a coalition would still need at least 12 and preferably 13 or more seats to form a government. Equestria had just seen how easily a majority of a few votes in the Horseshoe could slip away, and that was with a single party holding the majority. A coalition government would be even weaker.

Still, at minimum a potential Tricrowner-Everfree coalition would need just a dozen more votes to form a government. How hard could finding a dozen more parliamentary votes be? As it turned out, it was a lot harder than most Equestrians expected. The competitiveness of the 1009 election on all sides and the eagerness to lure votes away from the Triple Crown Party led to a lot of burning bridges and personal ill will between members of parliament and party leaders of several parties. The continuing heated debate over weather management and the resulting strained relations between earth ponies and pegasi also marred attempts to bring a more unified coalition together. With the government’s recent shift toward precipitism and productivist weather management, the Hibernal Party was the best candidate of the pegasus parties, but it had fallen to a paltry four seats in the pegasus reserved ridings. The Estival Party’s eight ridings would be a much greater boon to the Tricrowners, but even with them, the Everfree Party, and the Black Angus Party, the coalition seat count would only reach 97, three short. After days of trying to convince any of the earth pony parties to join the coalition, the talks fell apart as none of the earth pony parties, not even the Municipal Development League which was typically least influenced by agricultural concerns, were willing to work with the Estival Party. Another more controversial option soon presented itself after the Estival Party coalition was ruled unworkable. It would be dubbed by the media as the “Puddingian Option”, or more derisively in pegasus papers, the “Dirty Coalition.” With pegasus parties a non-starter, the Puddingian Option called for a broad coalition of earth pony parties with the Tricrowners and Everfree Party. On paper, it would have been able to form a government. The Tricrowners’ 71 seats, the Everfree Party’s 17, and the combined 17 seats from the Country Party, Municipal Development League, and Free Soil Party would give a governing coalition 104 total seats. It was only a four seat majority and with the Municipal Development League’s four seats as the smallest party, any single party could end the coalition by walking out. As it turned out, the Puddingian coalition ended before it could even begin. During the negotiations, the issue of ministerial appointments came up and naturally the conversation turned to the Weather Ministry. Fancy Pants pushed hard to keep Black Sun on as Weather Minister as a pony who, while she was a pegasus, could empathize and speak to earth pony concerns. Some of the Earth Pony MPs were convinced and relented on the issue. The Free Soilers, however, were still adamant about having an earth pony appointed as Weather Minister if they were to participate in a coalition government. That was apparently one hoofstep too far for Fancy Pants, and the Free Soilers walked out of negotiations. While this would have left the rump Puddingian coalition with 99 seats and only needing a single MP, whether Arizona or an independent, to create a tentative government, the negotiations with the other earth pony parties quickly fell apart after the Free Soilers walked out. That was the closest Fancy Pants and the Tricrowners came to forming a government in the immediate post-election negotiation period.

After the Puddingian coalition talks fell apart, Fancy Pants went to Celestia. As the Tricrowners were unable to form a government, the Coronists were given a chance at forming one themselves. This put Equestria even further into unprecedented political territory. For the first time in the modern party system, a party other than the Tricrowners now had the opportunity to try to take control of parliament. However, if the road to a Triple Crown-led coalition was rough, the Coronist path to a governing coalition was already near impossible from the moment they were given the reins. They had made gains in parliament, but even with that the Coronists only had 43 total seats. Parabellum would need to find another 57 members willing to be junior partners in a Coronist-led coalition. A broad coalition of the more conservative parties, led primarily by the Coronists and Hippocrats, could have theoretically amounted to 90 seats, but that would require the Country Party, MDL, and Free Soilers working not just with the Coronists but with the Vernal Party and New Pegasopolitans, something that was untenable from the start. Parabellum thus entered formal talks with the Everfree Party and the Hippocrats to see if the two parties could find a way to work together. This was by far the best chance for the Coronists to build a coalition. On paper, it seemed like it might work. The base opposition bloc of the Coronists, Hippocrats, Vernal Party, and Platina Party together held 66 seats in parliament. If they could bring the Evrefree Party into an agreement, that would bump them up to 83. Then they would only need 18 seats to command a full majority, still a tall order but one that would only need perhaps another three parties, much more feasible than trying to bring together a dozen squabbling minor parties. The talks were promising at first as both Jacobalt and Portwine expressed an interest in a governing coalition. Portwine, perhaps regretting a missed opportunity with the Tricrowners, still wanted a way into a governing position, and offered a way to bring in a block of earth pony ridings while not alienating the more Coronist aligned pegasi in the Vernal Party.

The snag in the talks then came not from the Everfreers but from the Hippocrats. The recent shift in the Party to Uphold Hippocracy that led to the more reactionary and on occasion even outright republican Unicorn Restorationists wielding more and more power in the party positions created disagreement among the party at the idea of the broader coalition. While the Coronists were still acceptable ideologically to many in the Hippocrats, some now leading voices in the party publicly chastised Jacobalt for being willing to form a coalition if it included the Everfree Party. Onyx Glow, the Hippocratic member from the Southwest Equestria unicorn riding, finally issued an ultimatum to Jacobalt on the eve of Nightmare Night. If Jacobalt agreed to enter a coalition with what Onyx called the “foreign sympathizers” in the Everfree Party, she would file an internal party motion to challenge Jacobalt for the Hippocratic leadership. This was an even greater challenge to a party leader than Noblesse Oblige’s threat to leave the Tricrowners. Jacobalt may have led the Hippocrats to a gain of eight seats over the last two elections, but three of the party’s ten MPs were Unicorn MPs, and many of their general MPs were from areas sympathetic to the Unicorn Restorationists or overlapping with the party’s unicorn ridings. If the Unicorn Restorationist Bloc was unified in wanting Jacobalt out as leader, it would be tough for the Neighvada MP to survive a leadership challenge and he could find himself facing a tough nomination challenge in his riding at the next election. So, in the beginning of November, Jacobalt backed out of coalition talks with the Coronists as long as the Everfreers were involved. After all that, Parabellum and the Coronists were back to square one and Equestria was, after months, no closer to forming a government than it had been right after the election.

The negotiations would continue for a time but would soon be cut short by the emergency. The past year hearkens back to an old saying that can be updated to the present .

For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost.
For want of the Horseshoe the government was lost.
For want of the government Canterlot was lost.
For want of Canterlot harmony has been lost.
For want of harmony Equestria may be lost.
All for the want of Rusty Nail.