Klaes Boerhaaf
| Prime Minister of Anglien | |
 | |
| Klaes Boerhaaf | |
| Personal information | |
| Birth name | Klaes Reinder Boerhaaf |
| Born | 1708 AN (53 AN years) Shelsa, Anglien |
| Nationality | Anglian |
| Residence | Shelsa |
| Citizenship | Anglien |
| Family | |
| Spouse | Griet Boerhaaf née Aaldertsen (m. 1731 AN) |
| Children | Reinder Boerhaaf Anke Boerhaaf-Terpstra Sjoerd Boerhaaf |
| Education and career | |
| Education | Shelsa cantonal grammar school |
| Profession | Farmer and cooperative official |
| Years active | 1745 AN to present |
| Positions and titles | |
| Office | Prime Minister of Anglien |
| In office | XIII.1759 AN – present |
| Monarch | Edgard III |
| Preceded by | Eduard Vogt (as Transitional Prime Minister) |
| Additional information | |
| Religion | Alpinist |
Klaes Reinder Boerhaaf (born 1708 AN) is an Anglian farmer and cooperative official who is the first elected Prime Minister of Anglien. The leader and founder of te Landbond, the interior agrarian league, he was elected Prime Minister by the first Diet chosen under the Constitution of Anglien in XIII.1759 AN, at the head of a coalition with te Verzetsbond and te Eilanderbond.
Boerhaaf spent his working life in the farming cooperatives of the interior bailiwicks, chairing for more than a decade the grain and dairy union based in his native Shelsa. He kept the interior supplied with food and sheltered people fleeing the western cantons during the Nü Krantisk Repüblik (NKR) occupation, and entered public life in the Constitutional Diet of the transitional period, where he assembled the interior cooperatives and bailiwick notables into the tendency that became te Landbond. He was the leading advocate of the entrenchment of permanent non-alignment in the Constitution of Anglien.
A blunt speaker with none of the administrative reserve of his predecessor Eduard Vogt, whom he had known since Vogt's service in the interior three decades earlier, Boerhaaf built his 1759 campaign on the charge that the metropolitan and eastern establishment had captured the reconstruction money while the interior went without. te Landbond returned as the largest single bloc, and Boerhaaf formed the first government of the Free Duchy under its permanent constitution.
Early life
Boerhaaf was born in 1708 AN in Shelsa, the interior town that had once been the capital of the Gralan Empire, into a family of tenant farmers of the surrounding bailiwick. He attended the cantonal grammar school in Shelsa but left at fifteen to work the family holding, and had no further formal education. The interior in his youth was a conservative, Crandish-speaking, and overwhelmingly Alpinist country of smallholders and market towns, remote from the trading capital at Johannsessbuurg and the administrative centers of the Lac Glaceian canton, and it formed the whole of his outlook.
Cooperative career
Boerhaaf came up through the agricultural cooperatives that organized the interior's smallholders for the storage, milling, and marketing of grain and dairy produce. He was elected to the committee of his local society while still a young man, and by the middle 1740 ANs had become chairman of the Interior Grain and Dairy Cooperative Union, the federation of interior societies known in Crandish as de Boerenbond, "the farmers' union". Under his chairmanship the union ran its own warehouses, a cooperative bank, and a network of buying agents that reached every market town from Bahira to Shelsa.
By the time organized politics reached the duchy the chairmanship had made Boerhaaf a public figure across the interior, with a base among the smallholders built on the union's storage, credit, and marketing operations. The Boerenbond stood apart from the broader mutual-aid federation te Verbond under Hugo Wenning, which it predated and which drew in the wider cooperative and friendly-society movement; the two remained distinct, the Boerenbond agricultural and interior, te Verbond general and duchy-wide.
NKR occupation
The Nü Krantisk Repüblik proclaimed from Arminsburg in 1753 AN overran the western cantons of Lac Glacei, but the interior bailiwicks around Shelsa were never brought under its control and held behind the line of the fighting. Through the sixteen months of the occupation the Boerenbond under Boerhaaf became one of the mainstays of the unoccupied duchy. Its warehouses and buying network kept the interior and the coast supplied with grain and dairy produce as the western economy collapsed, and its market towns and farmsteads took in people fleeing the summary tribunals and expulsions of the west, among them some Mala'anje and Alexandrian Nazarene families whom the union settled and provisioned in the interior villages.
Boerhaaf bore no arms and directed no fighting; the union's contribution was provisioning and shelter. The occupation left him a committed opponent of the NKR and extended his standing across the interior, and that record, rather than any platform, was the basis of the politics he brought into the transitional period.
Constitutional Diet and the founding of te Landbond
The Charter of Anglien promulgated at the restoration in 1754 AN concentrated the government of the duchy in the Sovereign Duke and a metropolitan-led Council of Ministers under Eduard Vogt, and gave the interior, populous but politically unorganized, little voice in it. Boerhaaf was returned by the interior bailiwicks to the 44-member Constitutional Diet convened under the Charter to draft a permanent settlement, and he brought into it the standing and the network the Boerenbond had built.
The transitional chamber had no parties, and its members sat as loose groupings of notables. Boerhaaf drew the interior cooperative men and bailiwick chairs into a working bloc, the largest single grouping of the chamber, which took the name te Landbond, the Country League, and the silver birch, the duchy's national tree, as its device. It combined a hard anti-NKR position with the charge that the metropolitan and eastern establishment had captured the reconstruction money, and above all with the demand that permanent non-alignment be written into the constitution beyond the reach of any future government. When the Constitution created a framework of registered electoral leagues, Boerhaaf registered te Landbond as a league before registration closed on 15.X.1759 AN, carrying the interior tendency of the Constitutional Diet into the duchy's first competitive politics.
Boerhaaf was the leading advocate of the entrenchment of non-alignment, the provision that the Constitution would make amendable only by a two-thirds vote of each chamber together with a referendum, the single most heavily protected article in the text. He carried it, with the eastern delegates around Hendrik Braam, against the Johannsessbuurg benches of the transitional government, together with the "checked crown" that stripped the ducal office of ordinary executive power. Both were carried at the referendum of 7.VII.1759 AN, and both framed the general election that followed.
Boerhaaf and Vogt were both interior men, and had been acquainted since Vogt served as assistant bailiff of Shelsa from 1730 AN and deputy cantonal administrator for the interior from 1737 AN, when Boerhaaf was rising in the cooperatives. Vogt had been born at Bahira, governed by written memorandum from the capital under a doctrine he called the Bahira synthesis, and was known for giving almost no speeches; Boerhaaf, from the neighboring interior, campaigned in the opposite manner, and their politics were opposed in almost every particular.
1759 election
te Landbond fought the general election of 12.XII.1759 AN on the charge that had defined it in the Constitutional Diet, that the transitional government's reconstruction program, and in particular the Bliven Fund developed within Finance Minister Catrin Halvordssen's ministry, had directed the reconstruction money to the metropolitan and coastal districts while the interior, where recovery had lagged, went without. That the endowment took its name from the first word of the ducal motto, Wii Bliven, Wii Stans, sharpened the contrast te Landbond drew between the establishment's monuments and the interior's neglect. The charge carried across the interior bailiwicks of Bahira and Shelsa, which Boerhaaf, standing for a Shelsa constituency, carried in plain and direct terms.
te Landbond returned twenty-two of the eighty-four seats on 32.0 percent of the vote, 230,400 votes on a turnout of 81.8 percent, the largest single bloc, ahead of Vogt's te Herstelliberalen on eighteen. No league approached the forty-three seats required for a majority of the full Diet, and the result turned on the coalition Boerhaaf could assemble.
Prime Minister
The first Diet elected under the Constitution convened in XIII.1759 AN and elected Boerhaaf Prime Minister at the head of a coalition of te Landbond, te Verzetsbond, and te Eilanderbond holding forty-five of the eighty-four seats. The sixteen members of the reserved community caucus supported the government on terms of confidence and supply in exchange for guarantees on the entrenched community protections, and Eduard Vogt became Leader of the Opposition.
On Boerhaaf's nomination the Diet elected Hendrik Braam of te Verzetsbond Chancellor of the Free Duchy, with the constitutional portfolio for the civil service, anti-corruption, and oversight of the Ducal Police Service and the State Audit Office, through which the coalition intended to pursue the reconstruction-accountability program at the center of its campaign. Edmund Hale of te Eilanderbond became Deputy Prime Minister and Marta Svensdottir of te Verzetsbond Speaker of the Diet; the reconstruction portfolios passed to the leagues that had contested the transitional government's handling of them, with Joost Veenstra of te Landbond taking Finance and Reconstruction, Willem Doornbos of te Landbond the Ministry of Justice, and Sanne Okkerse of te Verzetsbond External Affairs.
The government inherited an unfinished fiscal handover. The Concord Alliance grants that had underwritten much of the reconstruction were to lapse with the transition, and the Bliven Fund intended to replace them had only just been formed. Nouvelle Alexandrie had declined to subscribe in II.1759 AN, and the plan the Concord Council approved on 24.XI.1759 AN left the capital to five Concord states, with Natopia supplying the bulk. The fund that te Landbond had attacked in opposition as the instrument of establishment capture passed into the charge of the government Boerhaaf now led; its first transfer was due in 1760 AN. The coalition also entered office without control of the Burgenraat, the territorial second chamber, which was chosen indirectly by the bailiwick councils, weighted toward the established metropolitan and coastal councils, and stood outside the confidence relationship.
Boerhaaf took office as the coalition presence of the Concord Alliance wound down. Although the entrenchment of non-alignment had been his own flagship, he set out to see the drawdown of the Natopian garrison through on the timetable agreed in the constitutional settlement, which provided for its completion within six months of the vote, rather than to force its pace. His first government was formed around the reconstruction-accountability program and the orderly completion of the transition to a fully sovereign, non-aligned duchy.
Political positions
Boerhaaf is an agrarian of the interior, hostile to the metropolitan establishment of Johannsessbuurg and to what he casts as its capture of the reconstruction of the duchy. His defining commitment is to the permanent non-alignment of Anglien, entrenched against reversal, and to a hard exclusion of the NKR and its successors from the duchy's politics, an exclusion given legal form in the Volksherstelwet of 22.XII.1756 AN and in the Chapter X registration regime under which the Supreme Transitional Court refused registration to the successor league Erfgoed en Orde during the 1759 AN campaign. He speaks for the smallholder and cooperative interior against concentrated metropolitan and financial power, and made the accountability of the transitional reconstruction program the organizing charge of his politics.
Personal life
Boerhaaf married Griet Aaldertsen, of a Shelsa farming family, in 1731 AN, and they have three grown children, Reinder, Anke, and Sjoerd. He kept the family holding outside Shelsa and his membership of the interior cooperatives throughout his public life, and continued to reside in the town rather than move to the capital on taking office. He is an adherent of the Alpinist religion, the majority faith of the interior.
