Well, there was something similar to this in my Anarchy Online days. One of the factions, the Clans consisted of various different, well, clans with different ideologies and political goals. They all came together in the Council of Truth, which was basically organised and lead by players. The official side just filled in the various Clan leaders as actors, so there were always one or two of them present, to act as guidelines and so on.
It did work. Given EVEs bigger scope and possibilities for gameplay-supported player interaction there's no reason that something similar wouldn't work here. And I think all the empire factions should offer enough diversity to allow similar entities, maybe even some shadow politics by the pirate factions.
But this would take a lot of time from the event team that might be better used in creating new events since, to be honest, things like this will be 98% talking, 2% of actually doing things.