Galactic Empire

The Galactic Empire, declared as the First Galactic Empire, commonly referred to as simply the Empire, and orchestrated as the Thousand Year Empire, is the fascist galactic government that replaced the Galactic Republic in the aftermath of the Clone Wars and ushered galactic civilization into a new age.

Also known as the New Order, the Empire was founded and ruled by Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine, who was secretly in fact the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious, at the end of the Clone Wars. The new regime rose to power with a groundswell of populist support, promising peace and stability from the destructive Clone Wars and capitalizing on anti-Jedi, and anti-droid sentiment and eventually human-ethnocentrism with devoted to extreme prejudice, discrimination of and eventually mass genocide of Aliens.

or at least a thousand years, the dominant governing body of the galaxy was the unicameral, parliamentary, and democratic Galactic Republic, which was governed by the Galactic Senate and led by an elected Supreme Chancellor.

Early foundations
In the last decades of its existence, the Republic Senate became embroiled in bureaucracy, rendering it woefully ineffectual as a governing body. Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith known publicly as Senator Sheev Palpatine of Naboo, privately lamented the declining state of the Senate, noting that the Republic was "not what it once was".

Thirteen years before the Republic's end as a democracy, Darth Sidious orchestrated the Invasion of Naboo by the Trade Federation in order to create a leadership crisis in the Senate. Sidious used the crisis to manipulate the then Queen of the Naboo, Padmé Amidala, into calling a Vote of No Confidence against sitting Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum. The vote passed, and in the subsequent election, Sidious—in his public persona of Senator Palpatine of Naboo—secured the position of Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic for himself through a strong sympathy vote. Ultimately, he would be the last individual to hold this office.

In the decade that followed, Sidious secretly manipulated galactic events to the extent that war became inevitable. Besides persuading a dead Jedi Master, Sifo-Dyas, to create a secret clone army, he also tasked his Sith apprentice, Darth Tyranus, with exacerbating political tensions in the Republic and engineering a Separatist Crisis. These actions would culminate in the outbreak of the Clone Wars, the last conflict of the Republic, while Sidious himself "reluctantly" accepted emergency powers from the Senate.