List of First Ministers of Florida
1974-1979:
Lorenzo Clark (People's Democratic)
'74 def. John Harrison (National Republican)
'76 def. John Harrison (National Republican)
'78 def. J. Perry McCormick Sr. (National Republican), Johnny Hutchins (Social Democratic)
1979-1979:
Carlos Hastings (non-partisan)
1979-1982:
Leon Porter (People's Democratic)
'80 def. J. W. Hunter (National Republican), Rudolph Jennings (Social Democratic)
'82 def. J. W. Hunter (National Republican), Denis Colley (Social Democratic)
1982-1982:
Carlos Hastings (non-partisan)
1982-1988:
Joseph Robinson (People's Democratic)
'84 def. Ashley Carter (National Republican), Milton Greene (Social Democratic), Leon Porter (New Democracy)
'86 def. Milton Greene (Social Democratic), John Grady (Liberal), Philip Evans (National Republican)
1988-1990:
Ulysses Shelton (People's Democratic)
'88 def. John Grady (Liberal), Milton Greene (Social Democratic), J. Perry McCormick Jr. (National Republican)
1990-1996:
Rómulo Blanco Zaragoza (National Liberal)
'90 def. Ulysses Shelton (People's Democratic), Ian Dalton (Social Democratic), Anson Henry (National Republican)
'92 def. Elias Williams (People's Democratic), Patricia Kearney (Social Democratic)
'94 def. Elias Williams (People's Democratic), John Willie (Social Democratic)
1996-1999:
Harry Maharaj (National Liberal)
'96 def. Michael Johnston (People's Democratic), John Willie (Social Democratic)
'98 def. Theophilus Andrews (People's Democratic), Warren Goodliffe (Social Democratic)
1999-1999:
R. S. Hughes (non-partisan)
1999-1999:
Jacob Powers (National Liberal)
1999-1999:
R. S. Hughes (non-partisan)
1999-2000:
Thompson West (non-partisan supported by all parties)
2000-2000:
R. S. Hughes (non-partisan)
2000-2002:
Harry Maharaj (Party for Justice in coalition with People's Democratic and Social Democratic)
'00 def. Jacob Powers (National Liberal), Theophilus Andrews (People's Democratic), Cynthia Greene (Social Democratic)
2002-2004:
Harry Maharaj (Party for Justice in coalition with Social Democratic)
'02 def. Gerald Palmer (People's Democratic), Alejandro Rosas de la Vega (National Liberal), Cynthia Greene (Social Democratic)
2004-2004:
Cassandra Paulson (non-partisan)
2004-2004:
Cynthia Greene (Social Democratic)
2004-2005:
Rayfield Peters (National Liberal)
'04 def. Clark MacAulay (People's Democratic), James Fisher (Party for Justice), Cynthia Greene (Social Democratic)
2005-2006:
Cassandra Paulson (non-partisan)
2006-2006:
Rayfield Peters (National Liberal)
2006-2008:
Maria Stone (People's Democratic)
'06 def. Rayfield Peters (National Liberal), Barbara Monroe (Party for Justice), Cynthia Greene (Social Democratic)
2008-2010:
Rayfield Peters (National Liberal)
'08 def. Maria Stone (People's Democratic), Ramesh Narayan (Party for Justice), Pablo Guerrero Chavez (Social Democratic)
2010-2014:
Juan Diego Herrera Menendez (National Liberal)
'10 def. Maria Stone (People's Democratic), Ramesh Narayan (Party for Justice), Pablo Guerrero Chavez (Social Democratic)
'12 def. Walt Doolin (People's Democratic), Tom Ellison (Party for Justice), Pablo Guerrero Chavez (Social Democratic)
2014-2016:
Layne Brooks (People's Democratic in coalition with Independent Liberal Alliance and Party for Justice)
'14 def. Juan Diego Herrera Menendez (National Liberal), Leonor del Castillo Rivera (Independent Liberal Alliance), Florence Chin (Party for Justice), Pablo Guerrero Chavez (Social Democratic)
2016-2018:
Layne Brooks (People's Democratic in coalition with Alliance for National Unity and Party for Justice)
'16 def. Juan Diego Herrera Menendez (Juntos Haremos Movimiento), Leonor del Castillo Rivera (Alliance for National Unity), Maximiliano Lima Suarez (National Liberal), Florence Chin (Party for Justice), Julian Greene (Social Democratic)
2018-2022:
Vijay Rampersad (National Liberal)
'18 def. Layne Brooks (People's Democratic), Kenneth Scott McCormick (Party for Justice), Leonor del Castillo Rivera (Alliance for National Unity)
'20 def. John Baptist Tompkins (People's Democratic), Peter Ingraham (Alliance for National Unity), Kenneth Scott McCormick (Party for Justice), Matthew Roberts (Alliance for Change)
2022-2022:
Demetrius Dodd (non-partisan)
2022-:
John Baptist Tompkins (People's Democratic in coalition with Party for Justice)
'22 def. Vijay Rampersad (National Liberal), Peter Ingraham (Alliance for National Unity), Vidia Narayan (Party for Justice), Matthew Roberts (Alliance for Change), Valeria McCoy (Social Democratic)
Rising From The Swamp
The State of Florida technically fought in and lost the Great American War, but it might as well not have. The land wars in California, Texas, and the Border States were far away from her, and her troops were neither numerous nor well-trained - indeed, Floridan soldiers had the largest single reject rate, in part due to pervasive nutrition issues like pellagra. Moreover, while Floridan territory played a vital role in bottling Texas up in the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Navy was a lot better at running blockades than enforcing them - the ships that patrolled the Cuban Strait were Mexican, Georgian, South Carolinian, and Alabaman, but they were very rarely Floridan. Then the worm turned, and Allied troops overran the Keys, then up and down the coast, then penetrated deep into the dense vegetation of the interior to arm the slaves and farmworkers - and they took care of the rest.
The Republic of Florida was born in that context: the end of a liberatory war brought in from outside but led by Black slaves and, in a subsidiary role, Caribbean migrant farmworkers. West Florida was split off into the new and fractious Republic of West Florida, Tombigbee, and Escambia, and serious thought was given to dividing Florida into a Black north and an increasingly-Caribbean south, but in the end divorce would have been too much of a hassle. Instead, Floridan local government boundaries were revised heavily to allow different cultural groups a degree of autonomy, and a unicameral proportional (to combat gerrymandering) legislature was established on the national level. Out of fear of personalist dictatorship, the nation would be run on parliamentary grounds.
A People's Democracy?
At first there were two parties: the National Republican Alliance, the remnants of the antebellum establishment who wanted to secure a voice in the new nation and their almost-monolithically-Anglo supporters, and the People's Democratic Party, everyone else. (There were also some far-right abstentionists, but those groups were generally banned pretty quickly.
The first thing the People's Democratic Party had to deal with was leadership. There were two main candidates. One was Lorenzo Clark, self-freed general who had fled into the interior after killing an overseer two years before the war, rose to command a band of "Seminoles" deep in the wilderness of Bradford County, and led the taking of Pilatka and the Raid on St. Augustine. The other was Alan de Burgh, who had stowed away on a phosphate ship as a teenager, made his way from factory work in Montréal to law school at St. Andrew's to the Trinidadian civil service, and resigned at the outbreak of war to join the Texian Foreign Legion, then to unite the dozens of tiny militias of the 'Antillean Coast' into a Free Floridan Army. Both were highly respected, had loyal followings, but were also despised by small but vocal factions: Clark as a brutal war criminal whose militia had done as much harm to Black Floridans as Anglos and wanted to govern Florida as a warlord, and de Burgh as a soft-handed coward whose position owed more to skills at political maneuvering than directness and would make Florida a colony of the foreign powers he had grown up in and owed his loyalty to.
In the end, a deal was made: Clark would serve as the first First Minister and serve for three terms, and de Burgh would draft the Constitution and the party platform, as well as overseeing infrastructure. The system worked, long enough to build up a nation - roads and railroads built for passengers, not cash crops, were driven through and around the dense forest and swampland (one of Clark's few demands, made out of paranoia and a desire that if Florida were ever under threat her people should have redoubts to strike back from, created the most expansive National Park system east of the Mississippi, with even a conscious effort to allow some land scarred by agriculture and chemical defoliants to return to its primordial state), a welfare state backstopped by export tariffs and
de facto Texian-American subsidies built everything from schools and hospitals to flush toilets, and a syncretic culture began to blossom into civil society. Moreover, for all the differences between Clark's and de Burgh's political bases, the men themselves regarded each other with respect or even envy.
Then tragedy struck. Clark had regularly used painkillers since the war to push through despite almost debilitating pain from his constellation of wartime injuries, with persistent health implications. On September 15, 1979, something went wrong, and though the details are unknown due to medical privacy laws, Clark had to be flown to Charité Hospital in New Orleans. Accounts vary over whether he died there or en route; either way, Chief Justice Carlos Hastings was sworn in as interim First Minister the next day.
Things Fall Apart
Under normal circumstances, de Burgh would have been sworn in as the next First Minister after a
pro forma caucus vote. But the sudden circumstances of Clark's death and de Burgh's visible ambition led to rumors spreading that de Burgh had had Clark poisoned, or participated in or turned a blind eye to a foreign assassination attempt. Moreover, the next tier of federal government figures - people like Commerce Minister Leon Porter, who resented de Burgh as a condescending, unprincipled machiavel who stuck would-be rivals with politically poisonous jobs and lied about his religion and morals as a matter of course (up to believing, probably falsely, that de Burgh was personally having an affair with his wife) - wanted to get rid of de Burgh both personally and politically.
In the end, de Burgh saw where the wind was going, allowing himself to be sidelined with a university presidency rather than split the party. But de Burgh himself was not what the Porterites were afraid of - they were more worried about demographic change, in particular migration from the Caribbean to Florida, making the descendents of Floridian slaves a minority in (what they viewed as) their own country or allying with the remaining Anglo population. Middle-class Cubans (and, to a lesser extent, Granadines, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans) looking for a lower cost of living in a growing economy were moving to Pinellas, Louverture, Caliban, and other booming Southern cities; so were working-class Afro- and Asian-Caribbeans, many working for relatively low wages in farms and factories and sending big sections of their paychecks home as remittances. An attempt at dealing with the issue by restricting immigration led to widespread protests, pervasive illegal immigration, an economic crash, and finally an intra-party coup by Foreign Minister Joseph Robinson. Porter responded by attempting a party schism; less than a dozen Representatives left, and most were either bought off with porkbarrel spending or defeated in the 1984 election.
But Robinson's tenure was troubled in its own right; his attempts at dealing with the financial crisis by selling off state-owned enterprises was unpopular in and of itself, and he was viewed with suspicion by all major factions. De Burgh, by now an elder statesman, attempted a comeback before being brought down by sex scandals and the publication of offhand derogatory-bordering-on-slanderous comments he had made about basically everyone in Florida politics during lectures; meanwhile, a bunch of local politicians wildly overestimated how many people outside their counties had ever heard of them, and Robinson went on to a third term despite Milton Greene of the Social Democratic Party posing the greatest threat to PDP hegemony in Floridan history. His third term was occupied with a whole lot of nothing in particular; viewed another way, he made himself busy holding back Americo-Texian capitalists, crypto-socialists within his own party, rural conservatives, young urban liberals, and everyone in between. For his troubles, he became the first First Minister of Florida to leave office on his own terms, and lived three more decades as a Floridan elder statesman to die at the age of 93.
Among other things, he chose not to micromanage the succession; his party's rural base beat back challenges from all comers to anoint Minister of Justice Ulysses Shelton, best known for reforming the prison system and vigorously prosecuting vice laws. Though many voters in the South saw him as parochial and provincial, his ecumenical conservatism and distributist sympathies actually helped the party grow in many Antillean communities. At the same time, though, the growing urban middle class - both Hispanophone and Black Floridan - distrusted him.
This created an opportunity for the Liberal Party, once a liberal-Anglo splinter group of the National Republican Party, now beginning to realize the ambitions of its founder John Grady to build a genuinely interracial non-leftist opposition. Grady, who had assumed almost dictatorial control over the party in order to stamp out even the slightest hint of revanchism, turned it over to Rómulo Blanco Zaragoza, a Havana-born journalist and mystery author who had made himself into a community leader and influential conservative commentator since his de facto exile. Together, the two of them formed the National Liberal Party - chiefly a coalition of liberal Anglos and middle-class Hispanophones, as well as others alienated from the increasingly stagnant and clientelist People's Democratic machine. The People's Democratic Party, now with serious opposition to compete against, shifted - in response to the social permissiveness, pro-corporate economics (as well as consumer rights activism), and urban focus of the National Liberal Party, they leaned into social conservatism, pro-worker economics, and a focus on rural areas. It wasn't enough - the rural areas didn't comprise enough of the country to make such a base a sure shot at power, not anymore, and after a decade of uninspired hegemony people were ready for a change, particularly after the shambolic relief effort after Cyclone 89F.
Crossing Blue Water
Like Clark, Blanco Zaragoza's legacy is written all across the map of Florida. No longer autarkic and resource-based, Florida's economy diversified -it became a tourist destination thoroughly competitive with the Caribbean economies around it, its call centers and services sector play a vital role in the Western Hemisphere's system and even as far as India and China, and its tech sector is nothing to sneeze at. It was under his tenure that Floridan music, film, art, and design began in earnest to become well-known, and his support for a policy of deliberate and purposely-fostered diversity and integration was a breath of fresh air after the mix of segregationism and assimilationism that his predecessors too often brought about. Under his tenure, women gained an unprecedented presence on the economic and political stage, contraception and homophilia were decriminalized, high-speed rail was built from Caliban to Spartacus and Tallahassee and linked up with the North American network, food prices fell by half, and Floridan teams won the All-American Test and the Inter-American Cup.
There were other legacies, of course. Homelessness doubled, a casualty of gentrification and megaprojects alike. Sprawl stretched deep out in every direction from Florida's great cities, and megaprojects like the Union Games Stadium in Pinellas were built with cut corners and over budget, destroying entire neighborhoods to funnel money to foreign companies. The largest refinery in North America belches its toxic fumes across South Spartacus, and thousands of square kilometers of old-growth forest and wetland were cut down and drained. Income inequality has skyrocketed. The demands of tourism have had pernicious effects on Floridian culture, and the end of "community-based government" has left many poor communities with unique cultures in the lurch. The end of the alcohol-licensing regime has brought down smuggling, but also contributed to an epidemic of alcoholism. Cuts in taxes and the pegging of the Floridan piastre to the Texian dollar left big holes in the federal budget and obstacles to industrial policy, while new types of bonds encouraged municipalities to make unsustainable investments that would come back to bite them later.
Still, in the moment, Florida was booming, and he with it. Unlike the clientelist People's Democrats, the more ideological factions and dynamics of the National Liberals helped resolve the debate over the party's direction after Blanco Zaragoza stepped down in 1996. Despite spirited campaigns by status-quo supporters in Minister for Health Arthur Rowe and Minister for Trade Gonzalo Hernández Aguirre, the race was won by a candidate from the party's left wing in Minister for Employment Harry Maharaj, a labor reformist and grandson of Guyanese farmworkers who believed that, given the right institutions, union wage demands could be made sustainable without Texian-style corporatism or Cuban-style repression. Maharaj's style contrasted sharply with his predecessor - less polished and more gaffe-prone but considered more charming and genuine, Maharaj was liked among the public that respected but did not quite like Blanco Zaragoza, and his frank willingness to criticize aspects of his own party was, to many, considered a breath of fresh air after Blanco Zaragoza's sharp message discipline.
There was, however, only so much he could do. With regard to the power of foreign creditors and the new domestic upper class, the genie could not easily be put back into the bottle - an attempt to devalue the piastre in 1997 was stopped by flat refusals in Chicago and internal party revolt in Tallahassee. The same was true of the boondoggle projects, like the 1998 Union Games in Pinellas and the new Richard Chin International Airport in Caliban, which begun under Blanco Zaragoza; Maharaj entered into fewer of these (though he did begin some new ones like the modernization of the Port of Laval). And as much as the National Liberals had been built on anti-corruption activism, the realities of dealing with local clientelist governments and corporate power brokers had begun to get to them.
The turning point for Maharaj's government came in his second term. Prompted both by a desire to clean up local governments by making them more competitive and a desire to reduce the influence of ethnic politics, Maharaj made reforming local governments, including reforming their borders and imposing federal control over some of their powers, his main priority. When elements of his own party opposed it, he staked his government on it, threatening to leave the party with his supporters if the bill failed. It failed; he left.
Just One First Minister
It swiftly became clear that, of the four parties represented in the Florida House of Delegates, no two of them large enough to form a stable coalition would. Maharaj's new Party for Justice demanded a set of good-government reforms that neither the remnant National Liberals nor the People's Democrats were willing to agree to; meanwhile, the latter two parties, defined in opposition to each other, certainly could not form a government together, and the Social Democrats were not quite large enough to form a government with any one party alone. A brief government led by former Minister for Education and National Liberal leader Jacob Powers, formed due to constitutional quirks, held together briefly but could not do anything in particular, and was followed by the appointment of respected longtime Postmaster General Thompson West, who would govern by consensus until the elections in April 2000.
Hopes for a conclusive result in that election were dashed fairly quickly - Floridans wanted a government, but didn't agree in the slightest on which one. Though the Social Democrats' increase in seats was relatively strong, it still put them two seats away from a hypothetical and stable coalition with anyone else. After a long series of negotiations, Maharaj hammered out a deal with Gerald Palmer, a young reformist from within the People's Democratic machine who had executed a coup against the 'dinosaur' sitting leader Theophilus Andrews after the election, and Social Democratic leader Cynthia Greene. Their platform would include anti-corruption efforts without centralized reform, more investment in welfare programs, limited renationalization of state-owned enterprises, and maintaining the status quo on social and foreign policy.
Certainly the economics kept the government busy, especially with hammering out the details of those broad planks. But those were at least popular enough to get Maharaj to another term, helped by Texian inflation de facto leading to moderate devaluation and economic good times. The 2002 election gave Maharaj's government enough seats to drop the People's Democrats altogether, giving the party the space to take solid positions on social and foreign policy. On the former, Maharaj was a fairly standard North American secular liberal, legalizing abortion (though it is generally not covered by national healthcare programs), laying the groundwork for homophilic civil partnerships, and reducing alcohol taxes. On the latter, Maharaj tried to split the difference between traditional People's Democratic isolationism and the National Liberals' cultivation of regional ties by conducting shuttle diplomacy with the Old World - in addition to his Shaivism (albeit rather syncretic) and his Awadhi ancestry giving him an in with governments in India and parts of Anglo-Africa, he worked closely with France, Persia, and China, among other nations, to build stronger ties.
An Era of Weak Feelings
By the end, though, Maharaj was tired - despite being the first First Minister too young to fight in the War, he was showing his age by the end of his tenure, and a health scare in 2004 prompted him to decide to leave on his own terms. For his last trick, he directed and whipped his own party members to vote for his coalition partner Cynthia Greene as First Minister going into the election, part of a long-term plan to unite the internationalist, socially-liberal, economically-left parties. In one sense, this worked - around half of Social Democrats would vote for the Party for Justice in that election, nearly squeezing the party below the threshold. But the Social Democrats would survive, cut down to its most radical members, those who resented Maharaj and the Party for Justice for their history in the National Liberals - Greene, daughter of longtime leader Milton Greene, saw radicalism as the party's way back to relevance. Moreover, the negotiations made both parties look rather slimy, and many Floridans wanted a return to the status quo - but not under the People's Democrats, whose recriminations over losing power in 2002 were still ongoing and still toxic. That Rayfield Peters, businessman and onetime Minister for Commerce and Revenue (for about two months under Powers), was elected for who he was not rather than who he was would, in some ways, define his tenure.
Perhaps the greatest problem for his government was that, for all that the party had been a vital force on the Floridan political stage when it was formed fifteen years prior, by 2004 all the low-hanging fruit had been plucked; the party was a victim of its own success, both under Blanco Zaragoza and, in some ways, under Maharaj. Peters trudged forward, with his most notable legacy being selling the rights to supersonic flight over a corridor of sparsely-populated Middle Florida south of Agricola, allowing Texian airlines to avoid going around Florida or risking death at the hands of jumpy Cuban anti-aircraft artillerymen; opinions vary on whether the extra funding is worth the irritation and broken windows. Even an attempt at political drama, Daniel Robertson's attempt at a hard-right party coup against the government, ended in farce as Robertson withdrew from the race three days before the caucus vote after a promise to reintroduce the death penalty, one which was not carried out before the 2006 election.
In fairness, matters did intervene. Tensions between Jacksonia and Kanawha spiraled into a brief slapfight over the Line of Actual Control, a failed coup in Haiti led to saber-rattling with Cuba and Santo Domingo, and Conference governments across the south discovered that high-level communications had been penetrated by Free Mississippi - the spring of 2006 looked to many like the prelude to another Great American War. These prospects were good for the People's Democrats, both more trusted on military matters and able to capitalize on fears that even a war that did not draw Florida in directly might bring in new waves of immigrants.
Stone was a nearly ideal candidate for a People's Democratic Party uncertain of its identity. Party liberals could take comfort in the fact that, as a woman, she represented a rebuke of the chauvinist and masculinist establishment in her very person; not only that, she had gotten into politics as a Palmeresque reformist, and supported him to the bitter end. Meanwhile, party establishments noted the fact that she had gotten to the House of Delegates through loyalty and constituent service, that as Minister for Public Education she had quietly killed efforts to end zero-tolerance vice policies in upper gymnasia but stuck sharply to the party line on social issues, and that she had promised to give the Army and Navy a blank check to modernize, professionalize, and prepare.
But the skills that got her her name within the party alienated her to many non-members. She was viewed as a political chameleon, willing to take any position to get ahead, and monstered as both a reactionary and fundamentally unprincipled. Moreover, her term saw a run of terrible luck that also showed some of the fundamental inequalities in her government; the recovery from Hurricane 06A, which flooded much of Pilatka and Darnielle, was vigorous but largely funnelled through local power brokers in ways that often seemed corrupt, while the increasing threat of citrus blight, which disproportionately affected the South, was often put on the backburner. Overall, not only did it seem clear that the People's Democrats cared more about the North than the South, even their efforts in the North ended up sketchy at best. So it was that Rayfield Peters, sharpened by opposition and given another chance to be elected, returned to the First Ministership.
He didn't waste any time. New pesticides were legalized and deregulated to kill the citrus psyllid wherever it was seen. As for disaster relief, Peters' Attorney General, Bernardo Ramchand Cruz, ordered prosecutions against a swathe of local officials of all parties, and Peters was one of the seven heads of state or government to form the Gulf Coast Standing Emergency Relief Organization. That dovetailed with other new objectives, as Peters pursued integration, economic and social, with the rest of the Southern American Community - in part because, with economic slumps in Fredonia and Free Mississippi, Florida seemed likely to become the main economic power east of Texas and south of Illinois, and in part because those who saw integration as inevitable saw the late 2000s as the best opportunity Florida would get to have that happen on her own terms. For similar reasons, however, the bid for a unified currency, the "SAC dollar", failed: policymakers in Vicksburg and Charleston saw the possibility of such an agreement hampering near-term devaluation as dangerous, and figured that it would be just about as easy to join after the crisis as during it. They did, however, take the opportunity to liberalize, on mutual agreement, trade and travel barriers, leading to unprecedented migration from the other SAC countries south, encouraged by economic crises across the South and increasing nativism in the United States.
This helped divide the National Liberals. It had been needless, previously, to divide the National Liberals supportive of immigration in general from those supportive of immigration from the Caribbean and Latin America in specific - there was never any particular reason for it to be a wedge issue. But unlike the lion's share of the prior migrants, the new ones were considered likely to vote for the People's Democratic Party, which had long leavened its nationalism with a sense of "common destiny" with the other nations of the Black South. Moreover, beyond petty politics, the clientelism that the National Liberals had tried to leave behind still led many of its representatives to a dual mandate as both leaders of a diverse, multiracial nation and representatives of their de facto segregated communities, most of them Cuban or other Caribbean (Peters, born and raised in Gadsden County, was an exception). There was not quite enough space to make any revolt seem like more than petty communalism - but the debate would linger. Meanwhile, concerns about migration, about urban unemployment, and about the "cleaning house" of corrupt local machines replacing qualified and skilled administrators with neophytes, also festered. In 2010, Peters, seeing the way the wind was blowing, would decline to stand for re-election. His successor, Juan Diego Herrera Menendez, would represent the other wing of the party from his, and opinions vary over whether that was barely enough to prevent a People's Democratic victory (in coalition with the Party for Justice) or almost but not quite enough to cause one.
Reaction and Counter-Reaction
Herrera Menendez, a telecom oligarch from the suburbs inland of Pinellas, combined media acumen and high name recognition with hard-right views on both economics and social issues to pull off a narrow victory in the National Liberals' leadership election. He took advantage of quirks of both Floridan election law and National Liberal bylaws - by the time his victory for the leadership was assured, new parties could not register for national elections, and would-be delegates out of tune with the new direction of the party had no choices but to hang on or resign and be replaced by some loyalist. Nor could those very delegates coordinate their decision - many took the latter route, leaving their compatriots who stayed more in the lurch. With their traditional opponents divided on whether to outflank or swing to the center, and the Party for Justice increasingly seen as a sectional party no better than its opponents and uncertain whether to lean into that or work to combat it, a working majority of Floridan voters chose the one party that seemed to know what it was about.
In one sense, Herrera Menendez's tenure achieved its goals. He reshaped the party in his own image, slashed welfare programs deeply, and deregulated and privatized much of the economy. There were many factors in his 2012 re-election: Walt Doolin's attempt to unite the non-conservatives only succeeded in alienating much of his own base, two schismatic factions from the National Liberals kept each other below the waterline, and - perhaps most importantly - the deregulated news media allowed Vesperian-style foldettes like the
Pinellas Independent to grow quickly and push their audience to the right.
But the latter factor could not work forever. As the impact of austerity became clearer - persistently understaffed public services, rising costs of utilities, a bulky, expensive, and growing penitentiary service, and despite everything a growth rate no better than before - it was too much to expect them not to report on it, or on the steady drip of corruption scandals affecting the federal government as well as local machines. Moreover, Walt Doolin was replaced by Layne Brooks - an outsider from an academic background whose avuncular, unthreatening aura hid an effective political operator who had cut his teeth in student protests against Robinson (reports that de Burgh considered Brooks a protégé are, however, substantially exaggerated) and come back into the limelight in the movement against cuts to university funding and hikes to tuition fees. Additionally, the schismatic National Liberals had sloughed off their most controversial members to unite under one flag, led by the undistinguished but well-liked Leonor del Castillo Rivera. When the chips finished falling, the three parties of the center and center-left had a strong working majority.
In public, Herrera Menendez accepted the result; privately, he seethed and raged about conspiracies. Both versions of himself took it as a given that he would return, ideally (but, perhaps, not necessarily) by election. Others within the party had other ideas, and when it became clear that he wasn't leaving of his own accord, his former protégé Maximiliano Lima Suarez, previously Minister for Health, took the opportunity to use parliamentary tactics to remove him from the leadership. That got his dander up, and provided cover for Brooks to enact his own policy changes.
Barely enough. An effort to go beyond merely reversing austerity to enshrining rights to education, healthcare, and housing into the Basic Law was defeated - not merely by conservatives, but also by liberals and leftists who worried about the risks of future conservative governments using such provisions as social control, or the precedent of allowing the Constitution to be so freely changed. But austerity was reduced, the public universities were given autonomy and dedicated funding, already-strong privacy laws were reshaped into legal protection for women and minorities on the one hand and a weapon against lightsheet journalists on the other, and environmental laws were tightened. Respected for his effectiveness but feared and disliked as a centralizer and machiavel, the writing was on the wall for Brooks' premiership by 2018 regardless of his successes, as his coalition partners increasingly drifted away.
Indeed, for a hot second, the prospect of a reunited National Liberal movement seemed to be in the cards. It would be dishonest to lay that entirely at the feet of Vijay Rampersad, but neither would it be totally unwarranted. A quiet retail politician with administrative experience from both local government in Laval and a tenure as Minister for Urban Development under Herrera Menendez, who had stayed on good terms with both him and Lima Suarez throughout the split, Rampersad married a quiet but thoroughgoing conservatism with a moderate enough image not to scare off the suburbanites who had made and then broken Herrera Menendez.
In office, those dynamics fettered him but also freed him by giving him an out from some of the less popular policies the backbenchers sought. He would not interpose himself between Constitutional Court decisions ordering gender self-identification or recognition of same-sex marriage and their implementation, nor would he conduct any more unpopular cuts. Instead, he would pay deep attention to the polls, use local corruption scandals and the Attorney General's office to backstop support for cuts that he felt could be made, and firm up the National Liberals' new "potential partner to all, permanent friend to none" foreign policy through both trade deals with the United States and some tentative, minor, and deeply controversial talks with Jacksonia and Tennessee.
That controversy was overshadowed, not least by the People's Democratic Party in disarray. Brooks had left the leadership, but had done his level best to anoint a successor in John Baptist Tompkins, his Minister for Community Affairs. Tompkins, a bilingual Francophone who had been born and raised in Acadiana before moving to Florida as a Catholic seminary student, later dropping out to go to law school before leading the Floridan Catholic Legal Aid Board, was viewed as sort of intrinsically foreign by many People's Democratic members, and his support for massive cuts to military spending were viewed with deep skepticism. Matthew Roberts, a longtime backbencher who had become the
de facto leader of a clique of old-school People's Democratic delegates who saw themselves as unjustly passed over for ministerial roles, led a walkout at a caucus meeting with the tacit support of many local machines. While at the time many periodicals, within and without Florida, praised him for his principled move - aside from the pure drama, Roberts' three decades in politics had gotten him a lot of connections with reporters - after the election, and as time ticked on, it became increasingly clear that the project was one of pure vanity.
Rampersad's bid for a third term very nearly succeeded. The resolution of the internal tensions within the People's Democratic establishment certainly hurt; so, too, did his attempt to steal swing voters by promising military cuts, which both angered the top brass and made Tompkins seem more reasonable. Efforts to use Tompkins' foreign background against him were viewed as "dirty", and while the right-wing news media had somewhat revived, so too had a left-wing complement organized in large part through InfoSys and portable radio, strengthening both Tompkins and the revived Social Democrats. Even with that, the result was genuinely unclear in 2022, with both parties within striking distance of a majority; in the end, the Party for Justice chose to partner with the People's Democratic Party, but it was a near-run thing, helped by the long-term rightward drift of the party's aging, rural base.
Now, two years into John Baptist Tompkins' tenure, can we draw any conclusions? He has not fundamentally reshaped Floridan politics - indeed, this election had the least change from a previous one since 1994. Funding for public services, in particular housing, has been increased, and the government has begun to work with national civil society in a more organized and transparent way, but many of the more radical changes have been stopped in House of Delegates subcommittees or tied up in administrative law. Still, Tompkins remains personally quite popular, indeed one of the most popular heads of government in North America, and many analysts have taken note of a few recent photo ops with his aging predecessor Harry Maharaj. But who knows what'll happen?
...Oh, and to be clear, "Floridan" isn't a typo. It started out pronounced FLORidən, but that got melted down to the incomprehensible FLRRDnn, so now it's a regional shibboleth - Northerners say FLURidan (rhymes with "pan", sometimes even "pain" or "Malayan"), Southerners say FLORRidawn. Most Anglophone foreign media goes with the latter, but it's not at all consistent.