BREAKING: Watto Elected Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic
The polls are officially closed! The votes have been counted! In an upset victory, businessman and entrepreneur Watto J. Watto has beaten Leia Organa-Solo in the race for Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic.
Watto John Watto was elected the 2nd Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic on Tuesday in the stunning culmination of an explosive and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of Old Republic democracy. The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Leia Organa-Solo with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the Outer Rim and the galaxy, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Watto’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.
The triumph for Mr. Watto, 70, a junk dealer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration.
The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Organa-Solo, but of Supreme Chancellor Mon Mothma, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled. And it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the New Republic had slipped their grasp. In Mr. Watto, a thrice-married Toydarian who lives in a dust-wrapped three-story penthouse apartment in Mos Espa, Tatooine, they found an improbable champion.
Just after Mrs. Organa-Solo called to concede around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Watto told supporters;
“The forgotten male and female beings of our galaxy will be forgotten no longer. Now it’s time for the Galaxy to bind the wounds of division. It is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time. That, is so important to me.”
He offered unusually warm words for Mrs. Organa-Solo, who he has suggested should be in jail upon discovering she is the daughter of Darth Vader, saying she was owed “a major debt of gratitude for her service to our galaxy.”
Mr. Watto’s win — stretching across the battleground planets of Corsucant, Bespin, Malastare and Hosnian Prime— seemed likely to set off financial jitters and immediate unease among intergalactic allies, many of which were startled when Mr. Watto in his campaign cast doubt on the necessity of the New Republic’s military commitments in the Unknown Regions and its allegiance to the Banking Clan.
From the moment he entered the campaign, with a shocking set of claims that Teedo immigrants were rapists and criminals, Mr. Watto was widely underestimated as a candidate, first by his opponents for the Centrist nomination and later by Mrs. Organa-Solo, his Populist rival. His rise was largely missed by polling organizations and data analysts. And an air of improbability trailed his campaign, to the detriment of those who dismissed his angry message, his improvisational style and his appeal to disillusioned voters.
He threatened opponents, promising lawsuits against news organizations that covered him critically and former slaves/employees who accused him of sexual assault. But Mr. Watto’s unfiltered rallies and unshakable self-regard attracted a zealous following, fusing unsubtle identity politics with an economic populism that often defied party doctrine.
At his victory party at the Mos Espa Grand Arena, where a raucous crowd indulged in a cash bar and wore hats bearing his ubiquitous campaign slogan “Make the Galaxy Great Again,” voters expressed gratification that their voices had, at last, been heard.
“He was talking to people who weren’t being spoken to,” said Maz Kanata, 1,037, a restaurant/bar owner from Nymeve Lake, Takodana “That’s how I knew he was going to win.”
Organa-Solo’s shocking loss was a devastating turn for the sprawling world of her aides and strategists who believed they had built an electoral machine that would swamp Mr. Watto’s ragtag band of loyal operatives and family members, many of whom had no experience running a galactic campaign.
Mrs. Organa-Solo watched the grim results roll in from a suite at the Theed Hotel on Naboo, surrounded by her family, friends and advisers who had the day before celebrated her candidacy with a champagne toast on her campaign ship, the Millennial Falcon. But over and over, Mrs. Organa-Solo’s weaknesses as a candidate were exposed. She failed to excite voters hungry for change. She struggled to build trust with beings who were baffled by the leak of private images of the feminist clad in a metal bikini at the amusement of many males. And she strained to make a persuasive case for herself as a champion of the economically downtrodden after delivering perfunctory paid speeches that earned her millions of credits.
From Hosnian Prime to Jakku, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades during the Old Republic offered their votes to Populist supreme chancellor candidates, even in the party’s lean years, shifted to Mr. Watto’s Centrist Party. One planet near the Rishi Maze, Kamino, went to Mr. Watto by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mon Mothma won there by 22 points.
Mrs. Organa-Solo’s loss was especially crushing to millions who had cheered her march toward victory. For supporters, the election often felt like a referendum on species progress: an opportunity to elevate a female to the galaxy’s top job and to repudiate a male whose remarkably boorish behavior toward females had assumed center stage during much of the campaign.
Mr. Watto boasted, in a 12 BBY video released last month, about using his public profile to commit sexual assault. He suggested that female political rivals lacked a supreme chancellor “look.” He ranked females on a scale of one to 10, even holding forth on the desirability of his own daughter — the kind of throwback male behavior that many in the galaxy assumed would disqualify a candidate for high office.
On Tuesday, the public’s verdict was rendered.
Mr. Watto’s dozens of business entanglements — many of them in foreign planets — will follow him into the Supreme Chancellor seat, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest. His refusal to release his tax returns, and his acknowledgment that he did not pay federal income taxes for many galactic standard years, has left the New Republic people with considerable gaps in their understanding of the financial dealings.
But this they do know: Mr. Watto will thoroughly reimagine the tone, standards and expectations of the supreme chancellorship, molding it in his own self-aggrandizing image.
He is set to take the oath of office on Jan. 20.
