The Second Authoritarian Era refers to the period beginning in Karti on 6 May 2010, during which the Kartisian Suprematic Party (KSP) consolidated control of the state and established an overtly centralized political order. The event marked the end of uneasy post-crisis pluralism that had briefly flourished in the 2000s and heralded a return to strict one-party governance, comparable—though more technologically sophisticated—to the First Authoritarian Order of the mid-20th century.
The immediate catalyst was the Global Economic Crisis (2009–2012), which struck Karti harder than its littoral neighbors. With foreign investors retreating from cobalt ventures, railway shipments thinning, and remittances from Perantsa almost entirely evaporating due to the Visa Restrictions (2009–2012) on Kartisian workers and families, swathes of the population plunged into abrupt hardship. In the hardscrabble settlements around Meppo and on the thin wheat belts northwest of Almazar, months of fuel outages and bread shortages ignited rare demonstrations. Protest chants were pragmatic rather than ideological, demanding access to food and jobs.
The seated presidency chose repression rather than concession, dispatching conscripts to intimidate strikers at coal depots and port rallies. Yet public anger continued, emboldened further by exiled groups transmitting speeches and digital pamphlets from Molbra. Amid a sense of disorientation among the governing cadre, the KSP leadership—previously a disciplined but junior partner within the ruling architecture—advanced itself as the only reliable force able to restore “continuity and fortitude.” Loyal rail and mine bosses, owing their fortunes to party contracts, ensured the steady supply of cash and uniformed “protection units.”
By April 2010, rumors swirled of civil service paralysis, resignation requests, and ghost-writing within ministries. On 6 May 2010, in a heavily choreographed cable broadcast, the KSP announced itself as the steward of national survival, citing the Presidium’s “voluntary handover of transitional responsibility.” Few observers believed the language of succession—armed guards ringed the council plaza that night, and archive footage revealed smoke still lingering above Meppo’s worker district, where resistance had been drowned in tear gas the evening before.
The population’s reaction was sharply divided. Those tethered to elite complexes on the coast or state-furnished jobs viewed the move as the necessary discipline to secure cobalt rents; miners and inland farm migrants, by contrast, muttered about betrayal, recording whispers in encrypted chats that outlived the mass deletions of the security service. Meanwhile, international trade observers noted with alarm that the channel facing Molbra—already a chokepoint—now stood under a party that made no concession to transparency in customs dealings, linking political consolidation with the region’s strategic arteries.
Historians often describe the Second Authoritarian Era as the “reindustrial paranoia” of Karti, forged out of a fear that dwindling cobalt fields and waning foreign lifelines would strand the nation adrift. While initially promised as a stabilizing interval during crisis, the period effectively laid the foundations for a surveillance doctrine and suffocating unity that KSP structures actively maintain into the 2020s.