Maximilien Roth (born 1942) is a former Kruhlstutt politician and corporate executive who founded and served as the leader of the center-right Liberals from 1979 to 1999. During the incredibly long, stable premiership of Sandro Kepler (KU), Roth functioned as the de facto “Dual Prime Minister.” Serving formally as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economics, Roth wielded unprecedented power within the ruling coalition, utilizing his party’s massive parliamentary seat count to drag the traditionally conservative government toward radical economic deregulation and social progressivism.
Under Roth’s financial stewardship, Kruhlstutt’s burgeoning tech sector exploded into global dominance. He aggressively courted Kresimirian oligarchs like Bran Maj during the massive privatization of the 1990s, ensuring that Kresimirian raw steel flowed uninterrupted to feed Kruhlstutt’s infrastructure boom. However, this morally vacant, hyper-capitalist foreign policy destroyed his political career. Following the horrific 1998 Cetingrad Steelworks Incident, Roth and the Liberal party were severely implicated in deep, legally dubious financial ties to the negligent Kresimirian foundry owners. Facing intense public fury and criminal investigations, Roth abruptly resigned his leadership just before the 1999 General Election, triggering a catastrophic 40-seat collapse for the Liberals that nearly destroyed Kepler’s government.
Since 2018, Roth has served on the advisory board of the Kruhlstutt NGO The Nastavak Democracy Index.
Rise to Leadership and the 1989 Breakthrough
Born into an affluent, old-money banking family in Creuzholz, Roth entered politics in the 1970s, as a vocal critic of both the austere conservatism of the KU and the militant labor unionism of the SWL. He believed Kruhlstutt’s future lay in the rapidly expanding, unregulated semiconductor and logistics sectors.
Roth founded The Kruhlstutt Liberals in 1978, in preparation for the 1979 Kruhlstutt elections, where they won 15 seats and 10.1% of the vote. In 1984, Roth increased the Liberals’ share by 2.8% and they gained 3 MPs.
In 1989, the incumbent left-wing government of the Sovereign Workers’ League (SWL) had just violently fractured during the disastrous, brief premiership of Fietje Braunlich. In the ensuing 1989 snap elections, Roth ran a highly dynamic, pro-technology campaign aimed entirely at urban professionals exhausted by labour strikes. The Liberals surged by an unprecedented 60 seats, capturing 78 seats total and 22.9% of the vote, just above the SWL’s 22.5%. Roth immediately formed a powerful, center-right governing coalition with Sandro Kepler’s Kruhlstutter Union.
The Kepler-Roth “Dual Premiership” (1989–1999)
While Sandro Kepler officially held the title of Prime Minister, Roth was widely considered his equal in power.
By the 1994 General Election, Roth had expanded the Liberals to 94 seats, nearly matching Kepler’s KU (115 seats). Because the KU was mathematically entirely dependent on the Liberals to survive, Roth successfully bullied the conservative establishment. He forced Kepler to abandon the KU’s traditional, archaic social conservatism, steering the government into a fiercely centrist, hyper-capitalist lane.
This “Dual Premiership” was incredibly stable and financially lucrative. Roth systematically dismantled SWL-era labor protections, crushed trade union power, and slashed corporate tax rates, permanently transforming Creuzholz into the undisputed financial capital of the Nastavak continent.
Deputy Prime Minister Maximilien Roth at the signing of a cross-border logistics treaty in Creuzholz, 1996.
The 1993 Kresimirian “Fire-Sale”
Roth’s foreign policy was entirely transactional. In the early 1990s, the Divine Republic of Kresimiria experienced massive economic upheaval, culminating in the 1993 privatization of the vast Cetingrad state foundries to Maj Holdings.
Roth aggressively courted billionaire Bran Maj and other emerging Kresimirian oligarchs. Arguing that the SWL’s moralistic human rights demands were obsolete, Roth ensured that Kruhlstutt banks provided the massive, untaxed liquidity required for Maj to purchase the foundries. In exchange, Kresimirian raw steel flowed uninterrupted across Lake Vokavovic to build Kruhlstutt’s modern tech infrastructure.
The 1998 Cetingrad Disaster and Resignation
The moral bankruptcy of Roth’s foreign policy was violently exposed in November 1998. Due to severe corporate negligence resulting from the exact deregulation Roth had championed, Blast Furnace No. 4 at the Maj Steel Cetingrad Complex suffered a catastrophic failure, killing seven workers instantly.
The political fallout in Kruhlstutt was immediate and furious. Investigative journalists from the Creuzholz Express revealed that Roth and the senior leadership of the Liberal party maintained incredibly close, highly questionable financial ties to Bran Maj. Journalists were given documents by whistleblowers which explicitly detailed over 14 million Krones (KK) being illegally transferred from Maj Holdings shell companies in Kaskiv directly into the personal “constituency renovation” funds of five senior Liberal MPs, including Roth, leaving the Deputy Prime Minister with absolutely zero legal deniability. Liberal party campaign funds had been heavily subsidized by “Grey Market” Kresimirian steel profits laundered through Kaskivian logistics networks like Meridian Trade Systems.
Facing intense public outrage and the imminent threat of criminal investigations into campaign finance fraud, Roth’s position became untenable. Desperate to save his coalition government from total collapse ahead of the 1999 General Election, Prime Minister Kepler quietly forced his powerful deputy to step down.
Roth abruptly resigned the leadership of The Liberals in early 1999, replaced by the uncharismatic Markus Steinheil. Without Roth’s dynamic presence, and heavily tainted by the blood of the Kresimirian steelworkers, The Liberals suffered a catastrophic 40-seat collapse in the election. While Kepler managed to squeak out a narrow third term, Roth’s departure effectively ended the era of the “Dual Premiership,” forcing his party into a five-year exile of irrelevance until their spectacular resurrection under Robby Scholl in 2004.
Retirement
Following his disgraced resignation in 1999, Roth was rapidly shielded from criminal prosecution. He was soon appointed as the Senior International Liaison for KruhlBank Global, specifically tasked with managing offshore risk assessment. In 2002, he was formally registered as the lead consultant for the controversial, highly leveraged merger of VokaTech Logistics and the Creuzholz Maritime Trust, utilising his old parliamentary connections to ensure the Monopolies Commission under Sandro Kepler’s KU government rubber-stamped the deal within 72 hours.
Roth currently serves on the advisory board of the Kruhlstutt NGO The Nastavak Democracy Index, and is a large shareholder of banking firm Voka Lake Tradings.