SouthernKing
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Italian Social Republic
Capital: Nova Roma
Government: One-Party State, lead by Il Principe Nero, Junio Borghese
History: During the Second World War, the Allies had managed to land forces in Italy and evict Benito Mussolini's government from Rome, ultimately pushing the Germans completely out of Italy despite the Germans' use of supersoldiers, leaving a center-right, pro-American republic, under the majoritarian leadership of the Christian Democrats, to be set up in its wake. The end of the war created a significant amount of resentment from the Italian populace, who now had to accept the fate of being what was a de facto American client state, complete with the stationing of American soldiers on its soil.
This resentment grew during the first two decades of the Cold War, as the newly created republican Italy was clearly a country whose best days were rather far behind it. The country's economy, propped up almost solely by American-provided reconstruction funds during the 1950s, began stagnating and declining after those funds dried up, leading to a prolonged recession starting in the early 1960s. In the north, the Italian Communist Party gained droves of support to become a unified left opposition to the Christian Democrats. Elsewhere, the far-right picked up steam, capitalizing off resentment for Italy's fate.
1970 proved to be the breaking point. That year, an ex-naval commander named Junio Borghese, the "Black Prince," supported by Francoist Spain, far-right-aligned army and special forces units, war veterans, a number of industrialists, and elements of the Catholic Church, launched a successful coup, destroying the Christian Democrat government. The resulting civil war, complete with a disastrous bungled American attempt at intervention, led to the country being split in two, with the Italian Communist Party forming a People's Republic of Italy in the north with its capital in Milan. And, thus, Italy charged headfirst into the 1970s as a country firmly divided in two. The north became a prosperous democratic socialist republic, under the able leadership of Luigi Longo and Enrico Berlinguer, and a country which soon aligned itself with the Soviet bloc. But in the south, from Rome, Junio Borghese, the recreated Italian Social Republic became an Italian and Catholic nationalist state, and a wild card in the Cold War. Rome was rebuilt in magnificent style to become a Nova Roma, and the increasingly unhinged state began taking on aspects of the Roman Empire.
Tensions between the PRI and the ISR remained consistently high throughout the next two decades, with brief shooting wars breaking out in 1981, 1985, and 1992-1993, before cooler heads prevailed on all counts. Both sides soon possessed nuclear weapons, complicating the situation even further. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the PRI forging its own, independent path. Borghese, rumored to be ingesting the supersolider serum himself to give him prolonged life, gave the same serum to his soldiers. And that serum was supposedly what helped the ISR survive when the aliens came; the PRI was defeated, but the ISR's forces miraculously held the aliens back, reuniting the divided country, before proceeding to spread their rule outside of Italy - first to Corsica, then to Catalonia. Borghese himself has not been seen publicly in decades, officially retiring to his private palace in the heart of Rome to reclusively give orders to his loyal underlings, as a mythical "guide" for the Italian people.
Capital: Nova Roma
Government: One-Party State, lead by Il Principe Nero, Junio Borghese
History: During the Second World War, the Allies had managed to land forces in Italy and evict Benito Mussolini's government from Rome, ultimately pushing the Germans completely out of Italy despite the Germans' use of supersoldiers, leaving a center-right, pro-American republic, under the majoritarian leadership of the Christian Democrats, to be set up in its wake. The end of the war created a significant amount of resentment from the Italian populace, who now had to accept the fate of being what was a de facto American client state, complete with the stationing of American soldiers on its soil.
This resentment grew during the first two decades of the Cold War, as the newly created republican Italy was clearly a country whose best days were rather far behind it. The country's economy, propped up almost solely by American-provided reconstruction funds during the 1950s, began stagnating and declining after those funds dried up, leading to a prolonged recession starting in the early 1960s. In the north, the Italian Communist Party gained droves of support to become a unified left opposition to the Christian Democrats. Elsewhere, the far-right picked up steam, capitalizing off resentment for Italy's fate.
1970 proved to be the breaking point. That year, an ex-naval commander named Junio Borghese, the "Black Prince," supported by Francoist Spain, far-right-aligned army and special forces units, war veterans, a number of industrialists, and elements of the Catholic Church, launched a successful coup, destroying the Christian Democrat government. The resulting civil war, complete with a disastrous bungled American attempt at intervention, led to the country being split in two, with the Italian Communist Party forming a People's Republic of Italy in the north with its capital in Milan. And, thus, Italy charged headfirst into the 1970s as a country firmly divided in two. The north became a prosperous democratic socialist republic, under the able leadership of Luigi Longo and Enrico Berlinguer, and a country which soon aligned itself with the Soviet bloc. But in the south, from Rome, Junio Borghese, the recreated Italian Social Republic became an Italian and Catholic nationalist state, and a wild card in the Cold War. Rome was rebuilt in magnificent style to become a Nova Roma, and the increasingly unhinged state began taking on aspects of the Roman Empire.
Tensions between the PRI and the ISR remained consistently high throughout the next two decades, with brief shooting wars breaking out in 1981, 1985, and 1992-1993, before cooler heads prevailed on all counts. Both sides soon possessed nuclear weapons, complicating the situation even further. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the PRI forging its own, independent path. Borghese, rumored to be ingesting the supersolider serum himself to give him prolonged life, gave the same serum to his soldiers. And that serum was supposedly what helped the ISR survive when the aliens came; the PRI was defeated, but the ISR's forces miraculously held the aliens back, reuniting the divided country, before proceeding to spread their rule outside of Italy - first to Corsica, then to Catalonia. Borghese himself has not been seen publicly in decades, officially retiring to his private palace in the heart of Rome to reclusively give orders to his loyal underlings, as a mythical "guide" for the Italian people.
