The Rembrandter's expression mirrored his contempt for the ruling families of Split, and he shook his head.
"The truth is that while the situation on Kornati isn't actually anywhere near so bad as Nordbrandt's agit-prop paints it, it isn't good. In fact, it's pretty damned bad. You saw the slum areas in Thimble while you were in Spindle?" Terekhov nodded, and Van Dort waved a hand. "Well, the housing in Thimble's slums is two or three notches above the quality of housing available in Karlovac's. And the social support payments on Kornati have only about sixty percent of the buying power of equivalent safety net stipends on Flax. Starvation isn't much of a problem, because the government does heavily subsidize food for those receiving social support, but it's no damned picnic to be poor there."
"I gathered that from the briefing papers," Terekhov said, indicating the chip folio-littered desk, "and I didn't understand it. According to other parts of the package, the Kornatians are fiercely devoted to individual civil rights. How does a nation with that sort of attitude justify not providing an adequate safety net for its people? I realize there's a difference between having the right to have the government leave you alone and depending on the government to take care of you, but it still strikes me as reflecting contradictory attitudes."
"Because it does, in a way," Van Dort agreed. "As you say, their civil rights tradition is that the citizen has the right to be free of undue government interference, not to be taken care of by the government. When that tradition first evolved, about a hundred and fifty T-years ago, the economy was far less stratified than it is now, the middle class was much larger, relatively speaking, and the electorate in general was far more involved in politics.
"But over the last seventy or eighty T-years, that's changed. The economy's stagnated, compared to other systems in the area, even as the population's increased steeply. The poor and the very poor-the underclass, if you will-has grown enormously relative to the total population, and the middle class has been severely pinched. And there's a growing attitude on the part of some Kornatian political leaders that the civil rights of voting citizens are important, but that those of citizens who don't vote are more… negotiable. Especially when the citizens involved pose a threat to public safety and stability."
"This is the local 'autonomy' and 'freedoms' Tonkovic wants to preserve?" Terekhov asked bitingly, and Van Dort shrugged.
"Aleksandra's looking out for her own interests and those of her fellow oligarchs. And, to be blunt, most of them are a pretty sorry lot. There are exceptions. The Rajkovic family, for example. And the Kovacics. Did your briefings give you much detail on the Kornatian political set up?"
"Not a lot," Terekhov admitted. "Or, rather, I have a whole kettle of alphabet soup full of political party acronyms, but without any local perspective, they don't mean a whole lot to me."
"I see." Van Dort pursed his lips, thinking for several seconds, then shrugged.
"All right," he said, "here's the 'Fast and Dirty Rembrandt Guide to Kornatian Politics,' by B. Van Dort. I've already given it, in somewhat greater detail, to Dame Estelle and Mr. O'Shaughnessy, which I suspect has something to do with the nature of our instructions from the Baroness. Do bear in mind, though, that what I'm about to tell you is from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in."
He raised both eyebrows at Terekhov until the Manticoran nodded, then began.
"Aleksandra Tonkovic's the leader of the Democratic Centralist Party. Despite its rather liberal-sounding name, the DCP is, in my humble opinion, anything but 'centralist,' and it certainly doesn't believe in anything a Rembrandter or a Montanan would call 'democracy.' Essentially, its platform is dedicated to maintaining the current social and political order on Kornati. It's an oligarchical party, dominated by the Tonkovic family and perhaps a dozen of its closest allies, who tend to regard the planet as their personal property.
"The Social Moderate Party is the DCP's closest political ally. For all intents and purposes, their platforms are identical these days, although when the SMP was first formed, it actually was considerably to the 'left' of the Centralists. The generation of DCP leadership before Tonkovic successfully co-opted the SMP, but the appearance of a compromise platform, evolved after annual conferences between their 'independent' party leaderships, was too valuable to give up through an official merger.
"Vuk Rajkovic, on the other hand, is the leader of the Reconciliation Party. In a lot of ways, the RP is more of an umbrella organization than a properly organized political party. Several minor parties merged under Rajkovic's leadership, and they, in turn, reached out to other splinter groups. One of them, by the way, was Nordbrandt's National Redemption Party. Which, I imagine, didn't do Rajkovic's political base a bit of good when she decided to begin blowing people up.
"The biggest difference between the Reconciliation Party and Tonkovic and her allies is that Rajkovic genuinely believes the Kornatian upper classes-of which he is most decidedly a prominent member-must voluntarily share political power with the middle and lower classes and work aggressively to open the door to economic opportunity for those same groups. I'm not prepared to say how much of this position's based on altruism and how much is based on a coldly rational analysis of the current state of the Split System. There've certainly been occasions on which he's couched his arguments in the most cold-blooded, self-interested terms possible. But when he's done that, he's usually been talking to his fellow oligarchs, and speaking as someone who's occasionally attempted to locate a few drops of altruism in Rembrandter oligarchs, I suspect he's discovered that self interest is the only argument that particular audience understands.
"The most significant thing about the last presidential election was that the Reconciliation Party launched an aggressive voter registration campaign among the working class districts of Kornati's major cities. I don't think Tonkovic and her allies believed that effort could have any practical effect on the outcome of the campaign, but they found out differently. Tonkovic only won because two other candidates withdrew and threw their support to her. Even so, she managed to outpoll Rajkovic by a majority of barely six percent on Election Day, and that was with eleven percent of the total vote split between eight additional candidates."
Van Dort paused, smiling nastily, and chuckled.
"That must've come pretty close to scaring Aleksandra right out of her knickers," he said with relish. "Especially because, under the Kornatian Constitution, the vice presidency goes to the presidential candidate who pulled the second-highest total of votes. Which means-"
"Which means the fellow she had to leave in charge on Kornati when she went scampering off to Spindle is her worst political enemy," Terekhov finished for him, and it was his turn to chuckle. Then he shook his head. "Lord! What idiot thought up that system? I can't conceive of anything better designed to cripple the executive branch!"
"I expect that's exactly what the drafters of the original Constitution had in mind. Not that it's meant a lot over the past several decades, since, until the Reconciliation Party came along, there wasn't really any significant difference between the platforms of any of the presidential candidates who stood much chance of winning either office.
"But, after the last presidential election, Rajkovic and his allies-which, at that time, still included Agnes Nordbrandt-controlled the vice presidency and about forty-five percent of the seats in the Kornatian Parliament. Tonkovic's Democratic Centralists and the Social Moderates between them controlled the presidency and about fifty-two percent of Parliament, and the remaining three percent or so of the vote was scattered among more than a dozen marginal so-called parties, many of which managed to elect only a single deputy. I haven't seen the most recent figures, but when Nordbrandt's NRP disintegrated during the plebiscite campaign, Rajkovic lost enough deputies to drop his representation in Parliament to around forty-three percent, and Tonkovic picked up about half of what Rajkovic lost. I have no idea, at this point, how Nordbrandt's terrorist campaign has affected the balance in Parliament. I'd expect that from Rajkovic's perspective, the effect hasn't been good.