And that's why it fell apart. When things don't work out, people just divide themselves up quickly and before you know it, your military starts to go through voting as well!
Actually, Fontan fell apart for two major reasons.
The first was, indeed, that the realm had become factionalized, and couldn't agree on a good course of action; however, the main part of this reason was not that they were voting on everything, it was that they let the people who couldn't conceive of a new strategy working stay in charge of the military. So they found that Strategy A didn't work, and decided that the best solution was to keep trying more of Strategy A.
The second major reason they fell apart is because they had come to rely heavily upon the Fontan Lions. This high-activity elite army turned out to be primarily composed of either a multicheater, or an OOC clan so tight-knit they might as well have been one. Then, when their leader got reported to the Titans for threatening to report someone else to the Titans, and got a
private warning (I think it was private, anyway; it certainly was no worse than a public reprimand), he went absolutely ballistic, and ragequit, taking 3/4 of the Lions with him. Once they were gone, the military leadership of the realm turned out to have no clue how to actually run a war without the absurd advantage that kind of army gave them.
Democracy itself can be a double-edged sword, it's true, but to suggest that there are no democratic realms that have done well in BattleMaster is just patently false. Riombara, for instance, is highly democratic, and has survived through all but one of the BT invasions, defeated its old nemesis Enweil (also, incidentally, a democracy), and is now the 800-lb gorilla of Beluaterra.
