Sovereign Objection

"Election fever got its hooks in you this morning, Luna?"

"For someone who can't vote, you sure are quite invested in this."

"Not quite. It begins the process of your return to duties, but after today's referendum, that becomes a matter of bureaucratic process, not democratic uncertainty."

"Well… it did take some good old-fashioned hoof-greasing."

"Sweet-talking. Meeting people and negotiating. Usually it's not my business to participate in the drafting of laws anymore, but that doesn't stop me from inviting certain people to dinner. Telling them a few things they want to hear, peddling rumours, strategic gossip…"

"You have trouble withholding your honesty, sister."

"I didn't say it was a flaw! It's simply… an impediment to negotiation. Getting what you want out of people is like fencing. You need to be patient. Understand your opponent, anticipate what they want. Only instead of using that to position yourself and your sabre where they need to be, you're trying to make what you want sound like what they want."

"I'd like to see you try fencing, Luna. I feel like you'd probably lunge straight in and get yourself impaled."

"True enough. Just as there's more to today's election day than just the referendum."

"Not if we can help it! But I will be voting this morning in about an hour, I expect you will be accompanying me, and it's normal for there to be a news crew there to take some pictures, and they may push a camera in your face and ask for some words - you are topical, after all."

"Oh, heavens no. Just give them something anodyne about how you're looking forward to greater public participation and the continuation of the diarchical tradition or something. The last thing we need is for you to make a scandal of yourself on election day. If you say anything too outrageous you might even be considered to be in breach of campaign law, or at least somebody might try it. And whatever you do, don't talk about the general election."

"Yes, but we're supposed to be officially neutral. We can't be seen to be supporting any one side."

"Yes, but I can't do that in public. If any party feels like we're officially supporting another, they get very upset."

"Thank you, Luna."

Celestia stared, mouthful of waffles, before swallowing. "We have been kicking that can a bit, haven't we. Suppose I had best catch you up now, if you're going to sleep when we come back from voting, otherwise tonight's results coverage is not going to make a lot of sense at all."

"Well. Where to start… I suppose a quick primer about the process? Equestria uses ranked choice voting. You complete your ballot by ranking the candidates in order of preference. They count everyone's first choices, and if no candidate has a majority, the one with the least votes is eliminated, and their second preferences are redistributed. Then you repeat this process, eliminating the least popular candidate and redistributing their next preference votes, until someone has a majority. With me so far?"

Celestia patiently drizzled syrup.

"Oh! First past the post. We used to have that, but that produces unrepresentative results. Say you have an election with four candidates, and the winner gets 35% of the vote. The majority of voters wanted someone else."

"Moreover, if your favourite candidate is unlikely to win, but your second favourite is in a close race with your least favourite, you hurt your own interests by voting for your favourite candidate. So under the ranked choice system you just list-"

"Exactly. A side effect of this is that it permits a wide range of parties to contest elections without fear of hampering their compromise interests."

"Not quite, but most places use similar systems. For example, Sylvania uses a variant of this with multiple-member constituencies, and they have a quota based on the number of seats to fill, and they have transfers based on surpassing the quota, it's… complicated. It's allegedly more democratic but it makes Sylvanian elections take days to resolve sometimes."

"Grifreich uses a system called Party List Proportional Representation, where you vote for a party instead of a candidate, and then the parties fill seats based on their vote share from a list."

"But it doesn't allow for independent candidates to stand, which is where some of the real fun down here begins."

"Well, we get some joke candidates. There's a proud tradition of the sitting Prime Minister having half a dozen joke candidates running against them, especially when they're unpopular."

"Oh, it's technically possible, but highly unlikely. Important ministers tend to stand in safe seats that reliably vote for the same party, to ensure continuity."

"Historical precedent, mostly. Opinion polling, more recently data analysis, and also - well, demographics, frankly. Some places are just very predisposed to vote for certain parties because they represent the issues that area faces well."

"We have beaten about this bush long enough."

"Yes. They lead the current government, and have led most governments for the last thirty years or so. They tend to do well in places that are prospering, because your natural urge when things are going well is to not rock the boat, right?"

"It may be the wealthiest that lead the party - as indeed tend to make up most of the political leadership - but the people who vote for them are generally homeowners, generally older, and predominantly ponies. They tend to do well in places like the richer neighbourhoods of Canterlot, Manehattan, Trottingham, but also places like the garden counties of Whitetail. Places that like to think of themselves as 'classical' Equestria."

"Oh, very much so. They see themselves as a party of tradition. You can bet they're proud of having been founded in the 1630s."

"Well, in the last century their main opponent has been the Labour Party. They're funded by worker's unions, and they tend to represent poorer areas."

Celestia wondered if maybe this coffee wasn't strong enough. "Oh, goodness. I'll have to make this quick, because we still have a lot of ground to cover besides Labour. A union is… when the workers of a factory, or a shop, or any workplace, form an organisation to negotiate with their employers collectively, instead of doing it as individuals. It's different from a guild in that…"

"A guild?"

"Oh, that's right, you weren't here for those either. Y'know what, forget I mentioned guilds, they're not relevant."

"Point is, from around the 1850s on, as Equestria was industrialising, and more ponies were moving into cities and working in things like factories and mines, the way ponies looked at society changed. They became much more aware of problems like inequality, and the mistreatment of workers. But also they realised that if all the workers stopped working at once, they hurt the profits of their boss, which is called a strike. So they formed these unions to organise them, and went on strike for better conditions, better hours, and so on. It was actually this movement that led to the 1878 constitution."

"I… we're on this tangent, we might as well finish it. The reason the Labour Party uses a boat in some of their iconography is a reference to the sinking of the SS Rapport in 1872. It was an ocean liner - a large steam-powered passenger ship - bound for Zebr- sorry. Kwadube, which suffered a mechanical failure at sea and sank."

"Well, that far out to sea, even today a teleport of that distance is beyond the capabilities of all but the most accomplished mages, not to mention they'd exhaust themselves after rescuing maybe… five passengers out of hundreds, and that's assuming they were familiar with the nearest land - which they weren't. No, they had lifeboats - but not enough for everyone."

"Lifeboats cost money. They provided enough to give the impression of safety and satisfy authorities, and theoretically in the event of a slow sinking, enough to ferry passengers back and forth to a rescuing ship."

"You're catching on quick. The reason this was such a scandal is that the limited lifeboats were filled mainly with passengers from first class - the landlords, the owners of mines and factories, the business magnates and earls and dukes. Some of the passengers from the lower decks made it out, but the overwhelming victims of the sinking were the crew. And we know this because of the accounts of the pegasus messengers who were sent out with distress calls - the radio telegraph was still twenty, twenty-five years away at this point. They saw things the passengers in the lifeboats would never have seen - stewards barring the doors to the lower decks with passengers still inside, officers beating sailors for taking unused lifejackets - and lived to tell the tale. It was a shocking tragedy regardless, but the tales of these messengers turned it into a rallying point for the labour movement."

"I was there, Luna. Not on board, but I remember the news breaking. I was roused in the middle of the night to see if I could do anything, but it was too late. Not that I would be able to do more than lift one or two ponies from the water… I remember baptising the Rapport. The smell of the champagne as the bottle broke, cutting through the stench of oil. The faces of the passengers waving as it set off. I am… the only one left for whom it was not history, but real."

"I'm fine. I'll be fine."

"If I'm not, the news is going to have a field day later."

"The unfairness of the Rapport mobilised huge strikes that led to widespread reforms, including the 1878 constitution. That was in the works anyway, the strikes just made it happen a few years sooner. In a way it had a role in the Sylvanian revolution as well, since unions and strikes were part of that too."

"Sort of. They were behind huge strides forward in the early 20th century, but these days a lot of strikes are over a 2% pay rise here, a couple of hours on the schedule there. Many people are of the opinion that unions are obsolete, and I have to say… sometimes they've got a point. Strikes in the trains, the weather factories, nurses… they just cause disruption. And the leaders of the Labour Party are not so different from their opponents across the aisle - all privately educated lawyers and such."

"Well yes, they continue to return reliable MPs from neighbourhoods that traditionally housed industrial workers. Cloudsdale is notoriously red. So is Las Pegasus, Seaddle.. Most cities will return at least one Labour MP."

"Moon and stars, you're right, I need to step this up or we're going to be late."

"Next up is the Liberal Harmony Party."

"The Harmonists are actually descended from the philosophy of the Parliamentary revolutionaries - the current party only dates back to the 18th century, superseding a looser 'Lunar coalition'."

"It is why they're still nicknamed the Loonies today."

"They're a lot smaller than they were back in their heyday, these days they tend to court the votes of highly educated ponies. Their demographic is too compassionate for the Tyrians' stodgy traditionalism, and too modern for Labour's union rhetoric. Twilight Sparkle was involved with them as a student, I don't know if she still is."

"Well, they're more about process. They see themselves as the heirs of the architects of the Parliamentary system, and the academic and scientific tradition that came from that movement - they're big on taking policy recommendations from academic experts."

"I see they're not getting your vote."

"Let's move on."

"The National Party!"

"Yes."

"The National Party are actually the party of farmers and rural communities. They split from the Labour party some time in the 1940s over diverging interests between urban and rural, and by now are actually quite conservative - they're regular coalition partners with the Tyrians."

"Yes, it's very rare for any one party to achieve a majority in Parliament, so normally two parties - and sometimes more - will form an agreement to vote together on a shared agenda."

"Yes! This usually curbs the excesses of any given government, which is good for stability."

"Now, if you want to talk about trust in politicians being undermined, the incentive structure of multi-party parliamentarianism is maybe not the top of the list of things that contribute to that."

"Y'know, you're probably right. A parliamentary system is not known for bold plans, or swift, decisive action, but we don't have time to unpack that. We have to go perform Princesshood for the nation in five to ten minutes and we've only covered four parties."

"Oh, dozens."

"Well, dozens stand for election, maybe ten to twelve return MPs, and only these four return more than five."

"Well, you've got a couple of regionalist parties like the Palomino Republican Party and the Shetland National Party - they tend to be pretty single-issue. Maybe half to two-thirds of all parties standing are some faction that split from Labour at some point because they weren't radical enough, and they all have names like the People's Worker's Solidarity Front, or the Democratic Social Industrial Action Party, or some variant like that."

"Oh, not the same people. And then there's…"

"I don't know if I want to legitimise them by mentioning them to you."

"I suppose the news is going to talk about them. They have two MPs and are poised to make gains. The Tyrians have the same problems with radical groups splitting off every so often, but instead of splitting even further, these groups coalesced into a party called the Daybreak Party."

"They're racists, Luna. The Daybreak Party are racists."

"Remember those conversations we were having about borders and such? The Daybreak Party are one of the major forces feeding the idea that we should keep other creatures out, for no other reason than fear."

"I don't fully understand it. I'm sure there will be plenty of column inches written about them in the coming weeks. There's also… I feel a little responsible for pushing them into the limelight."

"After they won their first seat in the last election, that was the first time they came to my attention. Naturally I found their ideas odious, and their name a little too close to the idea that they had my endorsement."

"Oh, not just that, one of their more insidious ideas is that our unique circumstances are somehow divine, and that this confers divinity on to ponykind specifically, making them superior to other creatures."

"I know. Anyway, my reaction to this was to launch a lawsuit over the name."

"I wanted them to change their name."

"Don't start. Unfortunately, it turned into a media circus, and… a whole load of free publicity for them. The case is still ongoing."

"Anyway - we should probably set off."

"Please make it brief."

Celestia looked pensively to the ceiling while she cleared any stains of breakfast from herself. "I think we're probably going to have a Labour Prime Minister. The Tyrian-Harmonist coalition has been foundering. I think there may be tough coalition negotiations ahead, however, since I think the Loonies are in for a bad night, and Labour may be forced into an uneasy alliance with the Nationals, but maybe they can make it work with the Loonies and regionals or something."

"Oh, they've done it before, frequently. They're very coalition-friendly. Often the kingmakers of Parliament."

"That isn't my business. One prediction I am confident in, however, is that Equestria will have two Princesses by tomorrow morning."