You are not necessarily wrong but I’ve made my argument against having the Conservative enablers of Fascism take over the center stage from the out and out Fascists while keeping Solidarity, it is that it would portray the Fascist enabling conservatives of the 1930’s as a beleaguered yet “reasonable” centrist bulwark of some sort.
The only way you can talk about European Conservatives in the 1930’s is if you have the opposing side be the 1930’s Social Democrats. But then Alex would have to change the entire game around to the “Center cannot hold” or something like that. Portraying the faults in decades of arch-conservative and regressive policy in many European nations that created the fertile ground for Fascism and Communism alike to flourish while on the opposite side those Social Democrats with a modicum of power far too often favoured a negative peace over potentially disruptive potential for positive change…until it was far too late and the writing was already on the wall.
For all the faults of pre-war social democracy, it was then, as now, conservatism as a social and political force that was far more out of control and did much more to create the fertile grounds for the flourishing of alternative ideologies of which Communism and Fascism merely turned out the most successful. Even this was by no means a given and there were dozens of competing alternatives to Communism and Fascism, some of which might have been better, some might be even worse, though it is hard to conceive of the latter, I’ll admit.
Poison Queen Mara de Jade? Am I close.
Except restraint is the wrong tactic to use against Fascists, and there are the strategic risks of them gaining the upper hand if you always let them choose how and when to escalate.
“Every man a King”, eh? Makes me think of perhaps the most prominent American populist before mr. Trump Huey Long. For Moravia, which has an actual monarchy my mc, if going that sort of populist route would add “but no Kings to rule over any man”.
Thing to remember is that most populists are ultimately in it for themselves, not the good of the nation, however much they might talk about it. If it didn’t take so much “slumming” with unwashed masses Mara might like a more pure populism to “Make Moravia Great again”.
Indeed, separatist movements can have virtually any ideological stance, if the Anhaltian leadership in particular leans more towards the arch-conservative an alliance with New Order would be more likely then one with Solidarity.
If there is to be a populist route and my mc takes it, that would be one of his favourite lines of attack on the system and the monarchy. Nothing to incite a starving mob like reading out last night’s gilded royal court menu out loud to them after all.
See, my mc is bright, but the background for the poor character has already been somewhat more established in some brief throwaway lines, they became a domestic servant to a wealthy family at 13 and held various odd and little succesful jobs from there on out.
Misses Merkel’s Ostrich politics would hardly be winner in the 1930’s. I would argue they are not and have never been winner now either and have kept Germany far more stagnant than it ought to have been, but that’s beside the point here.
While I agree with the sentiment, I, of course, don’t agree with your particular choice of character. If we go more into the personal lives of our characters then I don’t know if my mc has much of one outside of politics as being a gay man from the wrong side of town in the 1930’s was in one word crap. The only ray of sunshine in my mc’s personal life at the moment would be a certain cute Frenchman, who he’d never have met if not for his political involvement. So, in spite of very much resisting being labeled as a politician, my mc would be mostly married to his current job and “chosen” profession and really not have much of a life outside of it, mainly because his life outside of it used to be shit and he’s busy trying to move on from it and save up for university as a contingency plan.
It would obviously be different for the non-gay and the middle and upper-class backgrounds who might gravitate more to what we might today call a healthy work-life balance. But, really, much of my mc’s life before politics was working to survive and being tired and hungry most of the time, a sad reality of the European working classes of the time. As a result, I don’t think my mc has (m)any active and exciting hobbies to write home about, except for maybe reading, which is personal and quiet and rather boring to talk about in his personal life. Though Franz might have dragged him into the cult of fitness.