Readers of this portal who have been following news in Latvia will know that for some time now, one of the more passionately (and quite often ridiculously) debated issues in this country has been the European refugee crisis and, specifically, the fact that all European Union (EU) member states are expected to take in their share of the people who have been flooding across the EU’s borders in record numbers in recent times. More nationalistically inclined members of our society have occasionally gone to fairly hysterical extremes in opposing the whole idea — the refugees might be terrorists! They might bring unknown and scary diseases to our country! Bring in one, and he will bring in his whole extended family, and soon we will be overrun by foreigners! Latvia and Latvians are in danger! The white race is in danger! (This last claim, which is beyond ludicrous on the face of it, really did appear on a few posters at a demonstration that was held a month or two ago to say “no” to refugees as such.)

The truth is, of course, that Latvia is not being asked to accept thousands upon thousands of refugees. The truth is that right now the expected number is 776, or 0.00038% of the country’s two million or so residents. Clearly that is not a number that will in any sense destroy the nation or its people. Yes, if the chaos in the Middle East continues unchecked (and now that Russia has made it clear that it is going to take part in the process without any checks or balances whatsoever, it is likely that it will continue unchecked for some time to come), there may be greater numbers of refugees whom Latvia is asked to accept, but even then it will not be millions.

There are several aspects to consider here. First of all, it is clear that not everyone who is crossing the Mediterranean or using a land route to get to Europe is fleeing for his or her life. Plenty of people are simply looking for a better life for themselves, and they are people who are classified as “economic migrants” and, therefore, not worthy of the status of true refugees. Thus, for instance, European countries have busily been sending back home migrants from places like Kosovo, where yes, life is probably rough, but no one is threatened by the kind of annihilation that we are seeing in Syria and the Middle East in a broader sense. That said, I do believe that there is a moral obligation to take in anyone, and let me say again — anyone who manages to escape a territory that is currently being controlled by the so-called “Islamic State.” That is a group of terrorists that goes completely beyond the pale, slaughtering anyone who does not comply with its very narrowly drawn understanding of what “proper” religion is. Residents of those areas have reason to flee, and there is every reason to believe that they should be given sanctuary. Yes, there is the consideration that those who are getting into rickety boats for the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean have chosen not to move to refugee camps in Syria’s neighboring countries, instead looking toward Europe as purely a better place to live, but in this case, that should not make much difference.

As to Latvia’s situation, despite what some foolish populists have been claiming, the government has drawn up fairly specific plans about what to do when the refugees start arriving, probably in December or January. They will first be placed in a refugee center at a place called Mucenieki, which is being expanded and renovated for that purpose. There they will stay until their status is determined. If it is found that they are truly refugees, they will be granted the relevant status, and after the three months are up, they will be released from the center and told to make their own way in life. During the process, refugees will receive subsidies from the government to cover basic needs. They will be stingy subsidies, the government having yielded before pressure from those who point out that the initially planned monthly stipend was rather much higher than the old-age pensions that many people in Latvia receive, and the sum has been cut even before the first refugee has arrived, but money will be made available for that purpose nonetheless.

What kinds of people can we expect? Well, first of all, it is not the case that all of those who are fleeing the Middle East are of the “unwashed and poor” variety of which America’s Statue of Liberty speaks. A survey that was released this week shows that plenty of them have completed a high school or university education. Latvians should understand this. Back in the 1940s, many of those who fled to the West in the face of a second Soviet invasion were members of the intelligentsia. It is specifically for that reason that at the so-called “displaced persons” camps in Germany where most of them first ended up, Latvians could set up schools, theatrical companies, opera troupes, etc. Throughout the Western world, Latvians organized social and political organizations, Saturday, Sunday and summer schools, song festivals, churches, and so on. That would not have been possible if everyone who left Latvia had been uneducated. The same is true of Syrians and Iraqis who are currently running for their lives.

One fact in all of this is that because of fairly massive emigration of Latvia’s residents to England, Ireland and other Western European countries (and here let us be perfectly clear that in every single case, these are “economic migrants” in the direct sense of the words), lots of businesses in Latvia have problems finding workers. On my television show a month or so ago, a sculptor called Ivars Drulle said that he would happily hire three or four refugees to help out at his farm – cut down bushes, help repair the barn, and so on. He said that his neighbor is a car mechanic who has been utterly unable to find anyone who can come and help out. Perhaps among the Syrians there might be someone who knows a thing or two about automobiles. Or putting up a barn. Or, in the case of the Ķekava poultry factory, which has also said that it needs workers, handling chickens and eggs.

Of course, it is unlikely that Latvia is the dream destination for most of the current refugees. Ours is not a rich country, we do not have anything close to the social care system that exists in Scandinavia and elsewhere, our winters can be nasty.   Those who say that nearly all of the refugees actually want to move to Germany, Sweden, or some other comparatively rich country are right. The thing is, however, that the distribution system that the EU has cooked up about this says that those who are sent to Latvia are going to have to stay in Latvia at least for a year or two. If they are found elsewhere in the EU, they will be shipped back to Latvia. And that, in turn, means that the real issue here is how the people of Latvia will receive these poor unfortunates.

It was a decade or more ago that a group of Somalians turned up in Latvia. They spent their three months and Mucenieki, and then they were basically thrown out into the streets. It was their enormous good fortune to run into a woman who knew the saintly Reverend Juris Cālītis, who recently retired as pastor of St Savior’s English Congregation in Riga. He personally took the Somalis in at the home that he runs in Latvia’s countryside for abused children. He personally contacted hotel owners and others to say that he had these Somalis, and could the businesspeople find work for them? Today, one of the Somalis has died, but the others have learned Latvian and have become a part of this country’s society.  It was the personal touch that allowed them to do so.

There is also evidence that there really are people who are happy to make new lives for themselves in Latvia. A couple of weeks ago there was a report in a newspaper in which a young man from Iraq at Mucenieki said that he really wants to get to work, he’s prepared to do any job at all, and all that he needs is for the government to grant him the appropriate status. Another newspaper report was about Vietnamese and Chinese people who are in Latvia because they bought real estate here and thus qualified for a residency permit in return for their investment. The Asians talked about how they were working hard to learn Latvian, one Vietnamese woman saying that she wants to become a “Latvian woman” as soon as possible, even though the Latvian language is not the easiest one in the world to learn. In another interview, a Vietnamese man who has been living here for some time and has become so familiar with the Latvian world that he has drawn comic books about the legendary hero Lāčplēsis, said that he, too, likes living here, though every winter he decamps back to Vietnam for a couple of months because it’s just too darn cold here.

So the bottom line here is that there is no real reason to fear the refugees. Latvia has never been a mono-ethnic country, there have always been others here. If the country and nation managed to survive 50 years of Soviet occupation and the relevant mass influx of people from the “brotherly” Soviet republics, then surely it can survive 776 desperate people from the Middle East. All that is needed to understand that they are not some amorphous mass. They are all people just like us, with their own hopes and dreams and aspirations. It would be terrible to simply turn them away.

Here we are again. It’s time for Latvia’s Parliament, the Saeima, to elect a president for the country. How time flies! It scarcely seems possible that four years have already passed since the incumbent, Andris Bērziņš, was elected. The person who is elected this time, probably in early June, will be Latvia’s fifth president since the restoration of the country’s independence and eighth or ninth in all of Latvia’s history (the last pre-war president, Kārlis Ulmanis, was not elected to the office, he grabbed it himself).

As I write this text three or four weeks before the actual election, I must say that I have no idea who will actually end up being chosen.  Latvia’s political parties, as is always their wont, are playing political games with the issue. The Unity party controls the prime minister’s office, the National Alliance (NA) has the chair of Speaker of Parliament, so the presidency should go to the Latvian Alliance of the Green Party and Farmers Union (ZZS), which is the third party in the governing coalition, for instance.  Apparently the characteristics and talents of the president are of secondary importance here. Political balance is the key.

I will first say that this is nothing new. Latvia’s first post-occupation president, Guntis Ulmanis, largely became president because of his surname (his grandfather was Kārlis Ulmanis’ brother) – tradition, don’t you know? Also in the running, incidentally, was Gunārs Meierovics, whose grandfather was pre-war Latvia’s legendary foreign minister, Zigfrīds.  The former surname beat out the latter. Mr Ulmanis, for understandable reasons, was not called Ulmanis during the Soviet occupation. He changed his surname after the collapse of the USSR and served two three-year terms in office.

Latvia’s next president, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, was elected only after MPs conducted five rounds of voting, with no one winning the requisite 51 votes (of 100). She did not appear entirely out of the blue, a group of intellectuals had been touting her potential candidacy for some time before, but it was still something of a surprise. Mrs Vīķe-Freiberga spent most of her life in Canada and returned to Latvia only a year or so before the election. Her election was due in large part to the inability of squabbling parties in Parliament to elect anyone who was a member of one of them.

President Vīķe-Freiberga was first to serve a four-year term, the law having been amended to extend the term for one year. She was so popular that during the parliamentary election that preceded her re-election, most parties swore up and down that they would support her and only her.  In the event, she ran unopposed and received 88 votes, with only six MPs voting against her.

Mrs Vīķe-Freiberga’s second term came to an end at a time when Latvia’s venal political system was at pretty much the height of its venality. A key showdown between the president and the Cabinet of Ministers occurred when the latter voted to amend Latvia’s national security laws to allow anyone vouched for by a member of Parliament to gain access to state secrets. The president blocked the law, which was clearly designed in support of some of the so-called “oligarchs” who were of great influence in politics at that time, and in a resulting national referendum, the overwhelming majority of residents voted against the amendments. The referendum did not achieve the necessary proportion of the electorate to count, but it did not matter, because Parliament had quietly reversed itself on the matter anyway.

The aforementioned venality was seen very clearly when the Cabinet of Ministers, led by Prime Minister Aigars Kalvītis (he would be the one who proclaimed “seven years of abundance” not very long before the Latvian economy crashed completely), dilly-dallied over a number of possible presidential candidates before suddenly coming up with Valdis Zatlers. It has gone down in political legend that agreement on this candidate was reached by a very small group of politicos at the Rīga zoo. Valdis Zatlers was a surgeon with no political experience whatsoever, but that made no difference to those who wanted to elect him. Neither was it of any importance to them that like most doctors in post-Soviet Latvia, Dr Zatlers commonly took under-the-counter payments from his patients and, crucially, did not declare this income.  In the event, he ended up paying a small fine after having been elected, but this blatant ignoring of an issue which, I would submit, would pretty much disqualify a candidate for the top office in the land in most civilised countries, was par for the course here.

President Zatlers served only one term in office. Readers may remember that during his term, politicians in Parliament and the Cabinet were starting to get up to their old tricks once again. One outrageous example was a vote in the Saeima to soften the law on money laundering, and with retroactive effect, thus almost certainly kowtowing to the scandalous mayor of Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs, who was (and is) being tried in court for a variety of sins including, no points for guessing – money laundering.  Eventually Dr Zatlers ran out of patience and invoked a constitutional procedure to dissolve Parliament and call a fresh election. The Constitution requires a referendum on the matter, and in this particular case there is no quorum of the electorate. The president signed the order on dissolution on May 28, 2011, and on July 23, 650,518 people voted in support of the order, while only 37,289 voted against it. A more ringing rejection of a class of politicians is difficult to imagine.

The problem for Dr Zatlers was that between May 28 and July 23, there was a presidential election in Parliament. Though he had been expected to win handily, the fact that his electorate was made up of the same people whom he was kicking out of office meant that there was room for someone else. What basically happened was that Andris Bērziņš went to his ZZS faction and said “What the heck, I’ll give it a shot.” On June 2, he was elected.

President Bērziņš announced several weeks ago that he would not be seeking a second term in office. His presidency has not been without controversy. The man is no great orator, and he is prone to making occasionally puzzling statements such as his remark at one point that no one had adequately explained to him why Latvia should have to take on the expense of serving as the presiding country of the European Union, as it is doing right now. Apparently the president needed different foreign policy advisors, because the presidency is a rotating thing that comes and goes automatically for all EU member states.

Once that announcement was made, the jockeying began. First out of the blocks was the Latvian Alliance of Regions (NRA), which is a small party in opposition in the Saeima, and came up with Mārtiņš Bondars, who among other things once served as chief of staff to President Vīķe-Freiberga. Another small opposition party, the clumsily named From the Heart for Latvia (NSL) came up with Gunārs Kūtris, a former chief justice of the Latvian Constitutional Court. Small opposition party, small opposition party, no chance, no chance.

The National Alliance has said that its preferred candidate is Egīls Levits, currently a justice on the European Court of Justice. The governing Unity party has had a number of potential candidates. Party chairwoman and former Speaker Solvita Āboltiņa has had ambitions for the job, though her reputation was sullied a bit during last year’s parliamentary election, when she fell short of election and got a seat in Parliament only after one of the candidates who beat her on the list suddenly, and without much explanation, just gave the seat up. One wing of Unity would like to see European Parliament member Sandra Kalniete in the job, and she has said that she would be willing to serve. The other wing of Unity will have none of that and at one time said that it would choose another member of the EP, Artis Pabriks.

That, however, was only until the ZZS came up with its candidate.  Here, again, we have a party of various constituent parts, and, as I have written in the past, it seems abnormal on a prima facie basis that environmental activists and pesticide-using farmers are in a single party. Of some importance in this case has been the aforementioned Aivars Lembergs, whose For Latvia and Ventspils party is also a part of the ZZS.  He has been known in recent times for fairly ridiculous statements about NATO such as the idea that NATO troops are actually an occupant force comparable to the Soviet military during the occupation. This initially suggested that the ZZS could not propose Defence Minister Raimonds Vējonis, who slapped the Ventspils mayor down loudly and firmly when he made those statements.

In the event though, the party did nominate Mr Vējonis, and Unity announced that it would support him, too. Unity and the ZZS have a total of 44 votes in Parliament, seven short of the 51 that are needed. The NA has said that it will continue to insist on Mr Levits.  The largest opposition party, Harmony, which is best known for being good buddies with the ruling United Russia party in our neighbouring country, as well as for being all wishy-washy about Russia’s grand military adventure in Ukraine, has said that it will nominate MP Sergejs Dolgopolovs. The NRA is sticking to Mr Bondars. Mr Kūtris from NSL has said that this is all a matter of tactics, and perhaps his candidacy will not be put forward officially.

All of this almost certainly means that the Saeima will not elect a president in the first round of voting. One key element in this is that the vote will be secret. This is another example of the vast gap that exists between Latvia’s political class and the rest of the population. In poll after poll, vast majorities of the country’s residents have called for an open election.  Yes, this would require a constitutional amendment, but constitutional amendments are not impossible. This is just another case in which politicos are putting their own “interests” ahead of everybody else’s. For our purposes, however, it simply means that there can be all kinds of surprises in the vote.

I must say that all of these political games are wearying, but also rather dangerous. The geopolitical situation in this part of the world right now is one in which it would be more than outrageous to elect to the presidency a neophyte who must spend the first six months looking for the bathroom key, so to speak. President Zatlers was just such a neophyte, and a few months after his election, in an interview, he came up with the statement “I am … yes, who am I?”. This example of existential angst became so well-known that this year the former president used the statement as the title of his memoir.

Completely lost in all of this political manoeuvring, therefore, is the question of what kind of person the next president will be. Will he or she be firm in relations with Parliament? Does he or she have a command of international politics? What does he or she think about relations with Russia? What are his or her views on the conflict in Ukraine? What about the European Union?  What about NATO?  Does he or she speak English, which today is pretty much a prerequisite for participation in international affairs?  When US President Barack Obama or his successor meets with the new Latvian president, with whom will he or she be meeting? And above all, what is the president’s experience?  Guntis Ulmanis ran a utility company before becoming president.  Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga was a celebrated psychologist. As noted, Valdis Zatlers was a doctor. Andris Bērziņš was a banker (and, as such, managed to ensure that he has the highest retirement pension in the land – another thing that one would imagine would not fly in many other countries).

To my mind, there are several potential candidates who tick all of the aforementioned boxes, first and foremost Mrs Kalniete. She is a former Latvian foreign minister, a former ambassadress to France, a former ambassadress to the United Nations, a former ambassadress to UNESCO, a former MP, and last year she was handily re-elected to a second term in the European Parliament. It would be hard to find someone more experienced and qualified. Not that that makes any difference in the halls of Parliament. Mrs Kalniete does not even have the support of all MPs from her own party.

To summarise: next month someone is going to be elected President of the Republic of Latvia. I cannot say who that will be. No one can. Is this a way to elect the country’s top official?  One might note that in some senses it is less onerous than what is going on in the United States, with literally dozens of Republican candidates all in a race to the bottom in terms of who can best serve the bigoted “base.” True, to my mind that almost certainly means that the next President of the United States will be Hillary Clinton, and that will not be a bad thing. But in Latvia’s case, as I noted, at a time when Russia is increasingly aggressive and increasingly imperialistic, politicians would do a very bad thing by electing just anyone at all.

Whew! The Latvian capital city of Rīga just finished being the European Cultural Capital, and the very next day all of Latvia became the presiding country of the Council of the European Union for the next six months! This is not an elected position, it comes around on a rotating basis once every … let me see, 28 member states, so once every 14 years. There has been mumbling in Brussels from time to time about the idea that this is rather silly, shifting the centre of operations, as it were, from Rome to Rīga and then on to Luxembourg City, as will be the case this time, but for the time being, the system is what it is.

In practical terms, this means that for the next half-year, Latvia will be able to set at least some of the agenda for the EU. Our government has said that priorities will include employment issues, further steps to overcome the consequences of the recent financial crisis, digitalization issues, the EU’s role in human rights defence across the globe, and particularly the European Union’s Eastern Partnership Programme, which seeks to develop relations with Eastern European countries that are not in the EU, but might want to become members in future. During the course of the presidency, our government ministers will become chairs of the relevant sectors at the EU level. A number of high-level meetings will be held, including a meeting of European and Asian education ministers, a summit meeting on standardisation in the EU, and particularly the Eastern Partnership Summit, which will bring together leaders from EU member states, as well as from the partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine). Fingers crossed that our ministers will be up to the task, seeing as how some of them are brand spanking-new ministers who only took office after last autumn’s parliamentary election. Fingers more precisely crossed that the same will be true of our civil servants, who will be doing the behind-the-scenes work to make sure that all proceeds smoothly.

(A parenthetical note, if one may: The centre of operations for the Latvian presidency will be at our comparatively brand spanking-new Latvian National Library, which means that for the duration, visitors to the library will have to enter through the back door, and they will find that much of the library is closed to them; be that as it may, if you happen to be in Latvia during the next six months, visit the library anyway – it is an architectural glory.)

The Eastern Partnership issue bears particular consideration for Latvia’s presidency, because, of course, to our East (and South) are not only the aforementioned EU member wannabes, but also a big country which would be just as happy to see the said wannabes far away from the EU (to say nothing of NATO). I refer, of course, to Russia, which is a country that appears to have endless stores of mischief and outright aggression in relation to what the Kremlin continues to consider its “sphere of influence” in geopolitical terms. Readers will know what this means. Of the aforementioned six countries, three, or one-half, have territory that is occupied by Russia either supposedly permanently (Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Transnistria in Moldova, Crimea in Ukraine) or at least temporarily (the Donbas in Ukraine). Moscow is betting, and not without reason, that the EU will not admit for membership any country that has outstanding border issues with another. Here it bears remembering that the absence of a border treaty between Latvia and Russia at one time was seen as a potential stumbling block for our own membership, though in the event the treaty was only ratified three years after Latvia joined the EU and NATO.

What might Putin do? I would say God only knows, but I suppose that even God with all of his omniscience doesn’t have a clear sense about this. It is clear that the sanctions that were imposed against Russia by the West in the wake of Putin’s grand adventures in Ukraine have started to bite and bite hard. Readers will know that over the past month or two, the value of the Russian rouble has basically collapsed. International companies that operate in Russia have found themselves having to change the price of their goods and services, as denominated in roubles, once a day or even more often. Inflation has been rising rapidly. Capital outflow from Russia, active for some time now, has turned into a raging torrent. The embargo on Western food products that Moscow imposed in response to the sanctions has in many cases resulted in food shortages. Russian leaders may smirk about visa restrictions that have been established on them, but it is clear that in many cases they are inconveniences for grand poohbahs who are no longer able to visit their villas in the South of France or whatever.

Now, in a normal country, all of this would turn public opinion against the ruling regime. In Russia, however, the Kremlin’s nearly total monopolisation of the mass media, and particularly the broadcast media, has ensured an endless flow of mendacious propaganda to suggest that Russia has done nothing wrong, the problem is that the wicked West has always conspired against it with the aim of bringing it to its knees. Putin said so in a speech a while back – even if Russia hadn’t begun to meddle in Ukraine, he said (thus, incidentally, more or less admitting something that he had steadfastly denied – that Russian troops are actually in Ukraine), the West would have found some other excuse to do what it is doing. The current government in Ukraine is made up of fascists. All of the bloodshed in Ukraine has been the doing of the said fascists (Russian TV has gone so far as to show grotesque pictures from conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya and claim that they are from South-eastern Ukraine). And so on.

With respect to the Eastern Partnership countries, it is not just Russia’s occupation of land. There is also the so-called Eurasian Union that has been Putin’s baby for the past decade and more. Initially established by Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus on the ruins of the old Confederacy of Independent States, the union is intended to be a counterweight to the EU. Readers will remember that it was specifically former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich’s decision to turn toward the Eurasian Union and away from the European Union that led to the protests that quite quickly caused him to close down shop and flee like the sinking-ship rat that he was. Certainly the new Ukrainian government has no interest whatsoever in re-joining the clutches of the Russian bear. By contrast, Armenia has signed up to the Eurasian Union, and its membership took effect on January 1 this year. It will be interesting to see what the Armenians will have to say when they turn up at the Eastern Partnership summit in Rīga.

There is also, of course, the issue of energy. Moscow has never been shy about using its natural gas supplies as a geopolitical tool of blackmail. True, this tool was more effective back when the price of oil was high. Now that it is very low, the room for manoeuvre for Gazprom is rather limited, because Russia’s national budget, such as it is, is predicated on the assumption that oil prices will be high. Still, it is worth noting here that last autumn, amidst much pomp and circumstance, Lithuania opened a new liquefied gas terminal that, crucially, will be appropriate for receiving so-called shale gas from the United States. Latvia’s government, by contrast, has spent years discussing whether it might possibly start to analyse the eventuality of perhaps considering a discussion about whether to debate the issue of maybe building a terminal of its own and then to ponder where to put it … that kind of thing. Enough said.

Finally, there is the Russian military. Readers will know that in recent times Russian warplanes have been regularly skirting and sometimes entering the airspace of NATO member states such as Latvia. The alliance has been forced to regularly scramble its own warplanes to go and chase the intruders away. This is a potentially dangerous game of one-upmanship. It is accompanied by a lower-level so-called hybrid war, which includes the aforementioned mendacious propaganda (Russian television channels are freely available here in Latvia, too, and it is worth noting that at least a few residents of our country have taken it to mean that they, too, should go to South-eastern Ukraine to fight against the “fascists”), as well as cyber-attacks of various kinds. It was no accident that the EU decided to place its main cyber-security centre in Estonia, which suffered a vast cyber-attack, almost certainly if not from the Kremlin, then certainly with its blessing, after the so-called “bronze soldier” riots.

The $64,000 question here is whether Vladimir Putin is crazy enough to launch a real conflict against NATO. There is a body of thought in Russia itself that suggests that messing around in places such as Ukraine and Moldova will not scratch the dictator’s itch, because such countries are not in the EU or NATO, and thus Russia’s intervention there does not affect Western interests directly. The Baltic States, which are in the EU and NATO, are a different matter, and they may prove to be too tempting a piece of fruit for the Kremlin to resist.

I doubt that this is true. After years of dilly-dallying about Baltic security plans, NATO in more recent times has been saying more and more clearly that if necessary, it will take all necessary steps to defend the three republics, as provided for in the famous Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. There are boots on the ground here already, so to speak – American and other soldiers who are here for the duration. Plus, of course, for some years now NATO has been providing the warplanes that are necessary for monitoring Baltic airspace, something for which we can be grateful not least because Latvia, of course, has no warplanes of its own. Far from it. This, among other things, has, with increasing urgency, brought up the issue of Baltic defence spending. Estonia spends the requisite 2% of GDP. Latvia does not and, even with all that is going on in Ukraine, will not until 2020 at the earliest. Once again – enough said. Readers may roll their eyes if they wish.

All that said, I do not believe that Latvia needs to fear for its security. It is likely that during the EU presidency Latvia will face various kinds of harassment from Russia, as Lithuania did do when it held the presidency during the second half of 2013. But Russia at this time is a wounded bear. The occasional swipe of a paw may be all that it is capable of right now. And I say again – NATO is standing guard. Amen.

In domestic politics, a big event this year will be a presidential election. Readers will know that Latvia’s president is elected by Parliament, not the public, and even though the new Parliament has a number of parties that wish to institute a popularly elected presidency, there is little chance that this will happen in time for the election that is to take place in June (and, for various reasons, it would not be a good idea even after that; that would be the topic for a separate column). The incumbent president, Andris Bērziņš, has not yet said whether he will seek a second term in office. He has been a mediocre president, I must say. No great orator. An excessive focus on business issues at the expense of human rights. Occasional weirdness (as in public ruminations a while back as to whether there really is any reason for Latvia to spend the money that is necessary to take over the EU presidency, as if this were not an automatic process). I believe that it would be just as well if he decided to retire, though that would mean the usual political ruckus in Parliament to come up with an alternative.

Finally, socially conservative readers may wish to skip this paragraph, but also in June, Rīga will host the European LGBT Pride event, Europride. Thousands of people are expected to visit the Latvian capital for the event, and although homophobic types have already been trying to organise a protest of opposition, the event will occur, and it will be a proud and magnificent event. All for the good.

All in all, I believe that Latvians can feel secure about their motherland during 2015. The economy is doing OK, just OK. The 2015 national budget is perhaps predicated upon excessively optimistic expectations of growth, but there will be growth. As noted, security in the primary sense of the word is abetted by the world’s most powerful military alliance. What remains to be hoped is that our politicians will simply demonstrate common sense in response to the various challenges that they will face. Of course, as always in politics, that is easier said than done, but fingers crossed anyway.

What can you do if you live in Chicago or London or Perth or Walla Walla? If you are religious, pray for Latvia. If you have the wherewithal, you can help financially. The Vītols Foundation, for instance (www.vitolufonds.lv), administers hundreds of scholarships to help needy students pursue a higher education. You can set up one of your own if you wish.

But above all, come visit! Not right now. It’s sloppy and messy outside with snow and especially slush. But think about it during the summer. I know that the American Latvian Association will once again be running its “Hi, Latvia” programme for American Latvian teenagers. I know this because one of my nephews will be one of those to take part. Why not come along with your kid? If you’ve never been here, I recommend it. Architecture fans will be agog at the variety of architectural styles, particularly Art Nouveau, that can be seen in Rīga. Countryside types can visit hundreds of guesthouses and inns all across the country (see www.laukucelotajs.lv for a list). It is a sad fact that during the summer, most of Latvia’s cultural institutions are shut down, but if you come in the spring or the autumn, there will be hardly an evening when you will not be able to attend a world-class theatrical or musical performance of one type or another. Come. You won’t regret it.

And keep on reading “Latvians Online.” Keep on reading Latvian news portals. Be up on what’s going on here, particularly if you are a citizen of the Republic of Latvia and plan to or have been taking part in elections. All of us have only these 64,569 square kilometres (almost precisely the same size as West Virginia in the United States) of cherished motherland. For all intents and purposes, the fact that ours is the independent Republic of Latvia is something of a miracle. It could all have gone differently both in the early 1920s and in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. We can all work to make it a better place. Of course, that is easier done if one actually lives here (in September it will be 25 years since I fetched up on these shores – where does the time go?), but, as noted, there are things that you can do, too. You can polish up your Latvian language skills, for instance. Yes, it’s not the easiest language in the world what with all of the cases and declinations and diacritical markings and what not, but knowing Latvian will allow you and your friends to talk about Americans or Canadians or Australians without them knowing what you’re saying. That’s something. And definitely make sure that your kids learn the language. Three hours on Saturday at the local Latvian school and six weeks at a summer camp won’t do the trick if you don’t lay the foundation at home. Perhaps one day your children will want to live and work in Latvia. That won’t work without the language. Don’t deny them the opportunity.

Happy New Year, everyone! It is wonderful that our country is free.