Damien Salamander

**Damien George Salamander**, **2nd Duke of Beijing**, (May 19 1980 -) was a Libirachi statesman and politician who served as president of the Imperial Cabinet from February 3, 2023 to July 27, 2033, having previously served as Minister of War in the Xi Jimping War Cabinet during the Has Wars from April 2 2020. and as the Minister of War in the Union of Aligned Nations from 2022 to 2023 under the Chairmanship of Penny Fox. As of July 27, 2033 he was granted the title of Duke of Beijing, the honorific lordship granted to former Libirachi presidents under the Fox Dynasty, becoming the second holder of the office since it's creation in 2024. Between 2002 and 2033, Salamander served as a member of the Libirachi National Congress.

As only the second president to serve under the new constitutional head of state format introduced in 2019 with the assentation of Laura Fox to Empress, Damien Salamander was an astute politician, renowned for his clever control over all aspects of his departments and then later administration; a fiercely loyal servant of the Fox Dynasty, Salamander was one of the principle politicians during the Reign of Penny Fox, taking responsibility in areas of policy like foreign diplomacy and the ministry of war, a department he personally ran between 2020 and 2025 (including for 2 years in his own premiership) and oversaw the Union of Aligned Nations equivalent department between 2022 and 2023. During the Has Wars and the subsequent Libirachi Civil War, Salamander played a key role in organising, equipping and coordinating the Libirachi armed forces in their bid to establish the Fox Dynasty as a global superpower state.

The premiership of Damien Salamander was notable for being an era of extreme change and political renewal, a key theme of the Fox II regime which did away with the old bourgeois leadership of the Empire that was a staple of the old Imperial Republic of Libirachi; this corruption was no more present than in the governments of Nathan Jackson and Xi Jimping wherein the same select group of power players held on to power from 2010 all the way until 2023 when the newly selected President Salamander removed the group from power and detained them in the first purge under the reign of Penny Fox, completely reinvigorating the government with new faces and ideas within less than a year of assuming office.

During his 10 years as president of the Libirachi Empire, Damien Salamander presided over the nation's growth onto the international stage, helping present an amicable face for the dictatorial regime in negotiations and meetings with other states - Salamander's tenure was marked by the Wahngso Crisis in 2026 and the Global Banking Crisis in 2027, both of which caused large scale upheaval within the regime as the Empress Fox attempted to purge officials deemed responsible. Salamander himself came to have a strained relationship with the empress by the beginning of the 2030s, and following the 2030 Presidential Election began to pursue an independent government by seeking to remove Fox from the mechanisms of government. Consequently, Empress Penny Fox backed the fanatically loyal Commission for the Preservation of the New Order in it's takeover of government, and granted her assent to the 2033 COMPNOR Coup d'état, which saw Salamander deposed and replaced with Propaganda Minister Karyn Voor; despite being removed in unfavourable circumstances, Salamander was granted the title of Duke of Beijing and a small pension in effective domestic exile. Following the end of his presidency, Damien Salamander and his wife Angelica separated; in October 2040, Angelica Rivera became the 12th president of the Libirachi state.

Historians generally view Damien Salamander as an above average president (at least until the early 2030s), along with the likes of Ashford Longwood, Karyn Voor and Eshter Morgan but below Stanford Rightly who is widely regarded as the best of the Libirachi presidents among scholars. Many of the political reforms instigated by Salamander during the 2020s have remained as crucial parts of the Fox Dynasty's political order, most notably the 2025 constitution and the establishment of an organised civil service to support the role of cabinet.

## History

 **President of the Libirachi Empire****Presidency**Salamander I • Salamander II • Salamander IIILibirachi Civil War • Wahngso Crisis • 2027 Global Banking Crisis • Mars 2030 Project • 2033 Libirachi Coup d'état • Imperial Privy Council • Politics of the Libirachi Empire

 **Electoral History**2002 National Congress Election • 2005 National Congress Election • 2010 National Congress Election • 2015 National Congress Election • 2020 National Congress Election • 2025 National Congress Election • 2025 Presidential Election• 2030 National Congress Election • 2030 Presidential Election

Born into an affluent family in Beijing, Damien Salamander began his political career as the Head Student at Beijing Shoon University, a respected position of student leadership which allowed him to enlist in the Civil Service in 2000, working in the Imperial Ministry of Education under Bowen Shi, before moving into the Ministry of Defence as a Junior Minister in 2002 thanks to assistance from his friend and mentor, Shi. Joining the Ministry of Defence, Salamander rose through the ranks of the department thanks to political weaving and became a vocal critic of President Zuma's regime, going as far to sabotage segregation acts proposed by Zuma in the early 2000s, earning him the favour of political exile Nathan Jackson. Escaping from the police task force tasked with hunting him, Salamander was restored to his office within the Ministry of Defence after Jackson overthrew the Zuma government in 2010. During this revolutionary period, Salamander made a name for himself as a significant civilian leader; Already by 2015 he had become the Deputy Minister of Defence, taking the place of his boss Alastar Brigman in 2017 during a bout of influenza. With the assent of Xi Jimping to the Presidency in late 2019, Damien Salamander became even more important, taking the position of envoy to the Armed Forces, reporting between Supreme Commander Kanan Garel and the President. With the outbreak of the Has Wars in 2020, Salamander was promoted once again, this time to the re-established position of Minister of War, granting him oversight into the management of both the civil service and the armed forces, closely working with Supreme Commander Garel and later Supreme Commander Cassio Tagge to ensure the smooth running of the Imperial war effort. As the war began to wind down in 2022, Damien Salamander was considered as one of the contenders to replace President Xi Jimping upon his retirement, alongside Alastar Brigman and Ashley Young.

With the Has Wars coming to a close, a plot was formed in Persia under the leadership of the new President, Almac Docu, a former Libirachi politician in exile for rebelling against the government; under a cloak of darkness, a set of assassins infiltrated Beijing and poisoned Empress Laura Fox in the evening of May 27th 2022, leaving the nation without a head of state. Taking over *de-facto* power, President Xi Jimping connived a meeting of the Shadow Council, consisting of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces Cassio Tagge, Grand General Guo Tijjan, Grand Moff Chen Bingde, Minister of War Damien Salamander, Minister of Defence Alastar Brigman and Director General of COMPNOR Penny Fox which unanimously selected the *late* Empress' daughter as the new regent of the Libirachi Empire, although she refused to waste time and resources on a coronation until after conflict stopped, instead taking over as Head of State from President Xi and the powers associated, despite not holding an official title with the authority to take the post. Meanwhile, as news of the Empress' death trickled out through the military command structure, several regions rebelled against the regime, such as the splinter nation of New Libirachi and *self-proclaimed* Grand Moff Alex Pandion's Imperial Fraction which seized control in the Lower Stan Provinces and Iran after failing to seize control in his oversector of Eastern China and the Acquired Provinces of Bovido Has. Whilst the Libirachi Empire continued its fight against the Bovido Line, the separatist groups united with Persia and several eastern European nations to become the Confederacy of Independent Nations, with Docu as its President. Facing a real threat of invasion, the Empire formed an alliance with the Russian Federation and Canogally to form the Union of Aligned Nations with Fox as its Chairman. As civil war broke out in Asia, Regent Penny Fox failed to make much of an impact on the nation in her first 6 months as leader and upon her resignation as Chairman of the UAN began a reshuffle of ministers behind the scenes, with Minister of War Damien Salamander taking over most functions as President whilst Xi Jimping began his retirement from the post before formally being dismissed on February 2, 2023. As the results of the 2023 Union of Aligned Nations Chairman Election were announced on the 3rd, Damien Salamander was sworn into office as the 10th President of the Libirachi Empire in a secret ceremony at the Forbidden Palace. Assuming command of the Xi Jimping III Cabinet, President Salamander re-shuffled the cabinet on February 20, 2023 to update and modernise the cabinet, whilst felling the power players who had held office since Nathan Jackson's election as president a decade prior.

## Presidency

 Main article: Presidency of Damien Salamander

 Empress

With the dismissal of Xi Jimping as president on February 2, 2023, Damien Salamander was invited to take the top spot by Empress Penny Fox on February 3, 2023 and formed his first Cabinet on the same day. Consisting of the same cabinet as Xi Jimping's second and third cabinets, the first Salamander cabinet was overhauled on February 20 the same year after necessary legislation and constitutional changes had been made to remove ministers from power and introduce new roles to fill the deficit. Following a cabinet re-shuffle on February 20, 2023, President Salamander introduced a new set of cabinet ranking roles to replace the decades old system introduced by Jacob Zuma in the 1970s, whilst also felling the cabinet members who had previously served under Presidents Nathan Jackson and Xi Jimping on the orders of Empress Penny Fox, bringing in a new set of talent to manage the empire, such as Wang Yang (former National Congress Chairman), Alexi Zaber (former governor of Mongolia), Freya Sherman (former Professor at the Army Division for Advanced Weapons Research) and Vladimir Medvedev (former General and high ranking civil servant).

Coming out of the 2025 Libirachi Presidential Elections, the Revolutionary Party under the leadership of Salamander formed a new cabinet on March 13, 2025, replacing the Damien Salamander I Cabinet. The cabinet consisted of largely the same Congressmen and Congresswomen as the previous administration, with the noticeable difference being the absence of former president Xi Jimping who declined to remain in office as Foreign Secretary, and was temporarily replaced with Jacob Zuma Jr. Having left the Union of Aligned Nations the same day, President Damien Salamander unveiled a new re-shuffled cabinet to tackle the changes that the new world order created following the end of the Libirachi Civil War of 2022 - 2024 and the Has Wars would bring and the Bovido Hassian empire that was beginning to re-emerge in the Middle East. Brining in newcomers Alexander Fowle, Carlo Boreal, Xiao Chen and Keely Morse to the cabinet as Minister of War, Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary and President of the Imperial Privy Council respectively.

### Wahngso Crisis

 Main article: Wahngso Crisis

The Wahngso Crisis was a political crisis and attempted coup in the Libirachi Empire which took place between August 17th and August 20th, 2026 in which the Libirachi Imperial Army under the leadership of Grand General Guo Tijjan, former president and Duke of Beijing Xi Jimping and Finance Secretary Vladimir Medvedev attempted to force the Empress Penny Fox to abdicate the throne and place Duke Xi as the new monarch on charges of un-constitutional behaviour under which the conspirators alleged that by having a sexual relationship with Director Freya Sherman of the Army Division for Advanced Weapons Research, the empress had violated the constitution of the nation and therefore was not eligible to hold the throne. Foiled by the many arms of the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order, the Wahngso coup marked a turning point in Libirachi internal politics, providing a platform on which the Empress Fox could begin to dismantle the power and dominance of the Libirachi Imperial Army within the empire that had lasted since the days of Stanford Rightly and Ashford Longwood, but only further exacerbated by her mother Fox I with the 2019 Libirachi Coup d'état. Beginning a rollout of her New-Think ideology, Penny Fox started a process of removing army domination from the Libirachi government and replacing them with officers of the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order (COMPNOR), phasing out soldiers and generals in favour of intelligence agents. Likewise, the failure of the Imperial Guard to defend the Empress led to the creation of the Vindicta, a special division of COMPNOR which reports directly to Penny Fox, under the leadership of Maximilian Veers, the General who rescued the Libirachi empress from coup forces during the crisis. Marching into the Forbidden City in Beijing with a large division of the Imperial First Legion on August 17th, 2026, Grand General Guo Tijjan relieved control of the palace from the Imperial Guard forcefully, detaining and in some instances shooting the soldiers loyal to the Empress who were protecting the head of state in her abode in order to secure the complex and keep the Empress Fox under house arrest, whilst also detaining members of the imperial household such as Freya Sherman, Keely Morse and Director Lloyd George of COMPNOR within the palace of Wahngso.

With the Imperial Guard eradicated, the Libirachi army tightened its grip on the Forbidden City, sending out increased patrols into Tiananmen square in front of the city, as well as securing the large grounds of the city with special forces divisions. Confronting the Empress Fox in her quarters in the Forbidden City, Duke Xi, Secretary Medvedev and Grand General Guo forced their way into the Wahngso palace where Penny Fox was residing and placed their head of state under arrest before listing off a her alleged crimes such as sedition, treason and unconstitutional behaviour, attempting to force her to abdicate the throne and place former President Xi Jimping as the new monarch through the drafted Bill of Abdication 2026, although Fox stubbornly refused to concede and denied assent to the bill. Managing to get out a coded message to the Imperial Security Bureau, Director General Lloyd George of Imperial Intelligence alerted the imperial secret police and intelligence agency to the coup, and with much of high command either detained or complicit, the chain of command was incredibly vague, leading General Maximilian Veers of the COMPNOR security forces to take command of a division of soldiers loyal to the regime and on August 19, 2026 the division stormed the Wahngso palace, rescuing the empress consort Freya Sherman and Director Lloyd George from the palace in the evening of the 19th, allowing them to escape the coup and call in reinforcements to liberate the Empress Fox. Staying at the palace over the night of 19/20th August, the forces led by General Veers continued to sweep through the Forbidden City, using their special forces training to overcome the members of the First Legion, capturing Duke Xi Jimping and Secretary Vladimir Medvedev and detaining them as Grand General Guo Tijjan fled the palace at midday on the 20th, before being traced down by members of the ISB with both General Guo and his entourage gunned down and executed on the Trans-Siberian Railway as they attempted to flee the country into the Russian Federation.

### Downfall

    By the end of the 2020s, and emboldened both by the Wahngso Crisis and powers granted to him to deal with the Global Banking Crisis in 2027, President Damien Salamander began to establish his own political doctrine, in direct opposition to large parts of the Empress' New-Think ideology for it's pandering to Western nations like the United States of America in regards to internal elections, believing that the Libirachi Empire should act as it's own master and forge a new political path to secure the country's dominance on the world stage, and as such began pushing for the presidency to receive new and expanded powers, like those that the office wielded prior to the 2019 Libirachi Coup d'état. Angered by the limitations of his office and the laws forced upon him by the Empress Fox, Salamander began to treat the title as if it were akin to that of a Prime Minister in a constitutional monarchy, appointing Revolutionary Party loyalists such as Ross Kenanson to cabinet following the 2030 Libirachi Presidential Election, earning the ire of Penny Fox and the ever loyal Commission for the Preservation of the New Order, which under the leadership of Minister Karyn Voor, beginning a slow centralisation of power, using forces such as the ISB and Imperial Intelligence to slowly purge the ranks of the Revolutionary party.

Described as a self coup, the 2033 Libirachi Coup d'état begun with the enactment of the Voor Proclamation on July 26, 2033, which ordered the arrests of vast swathes of the congressional Revolutionary Party and orchestrated the appointment of new congress-people loyal to COMPNOR, before forces of the Imperial Security Bureau and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection stormed the Hall of Revolution on July 27th and arrested President Damien Salamander under the charge of "Conspiracy to overthrow the Empress Fox", recalling all congress-people to a special session of congress where a conformation vote was held to replace President Salamander, leading to the selection of Karyn Voor as the new president thanks to the COMPNOR agents within the Revolutionary party. Detaining President Salamander on the morning of July 27, the Libirachi National Congress was recalled to a special session on the evening of the same day, voting to officially confirm Voor as the new president, although in spite of this, the Revolutionary party (partly filled with COMPNOR loyalists) ended up split in their vote, with at least 700 votes from within the party being cast for the incumbent president rather than for Voor. With the Congress of the Libirachi National Congress voting on July 27, Empress Penny Fox appointed Karyn Voor as president for the remainder of president Salamander's third term, allowing her to take control of the Salamander III Cabinet and form the Voor I Cabinet. Despite being touted as a democratic election, the voting proceedings took place in the Libirachi National Congress, with the Revolutionary Party holding 2199 out of 2900 votes, meaning that the incumbent president would win regardless of the votes of the National Front coalition of parties, each of which is also controlled by the government; the 2033 election was notable for the large amount of voting not following party lines and much of the National Front abandoned it's candidate, the 85 year old Zhang Dejiang, in favour of one of the Revolutionary party candidates.

## Legacy

Despite having been deposed as president of the Libirachi Empire, Damien Salamander remained an influential voice within the Fox Dynasty until the 2034 Libirachi Army Purge, during which he was placed under house arrest by the Imperial Security Bureau and forced into effective exile despite his title as Duke of Beijing. Under the presidency of Karyn Voor, Salamander was largely side-lined by the government and confined to a private villa in the countryside, cementing his political downfall. Despite this fall from grace, many of President Salamander's political policies remained under his successor, especially his economic policies which would go on to form the backbone of much of the New-Think doctrine's response to fiscal responsibility.

## Gallery

Damien Salamander 2023President Salamander in 2032Damien Salamander in 2025Portrait of Damien SalamanderDamien Salamander at the UNDamien SalamanderDamien Salamander at a parade (2023)President Trudeau greets President Salamander in CanadaPresident Macron greets President Salamander in DunsteenPresident Salamander and First Lady Angelica SalamanderDamien Salamander and wife visit ShanghaiPresident Salamander arrives in BeijingPresident Salamander inspects soldiers at the Beijing Imperial Academy