More Surprises Than Anticipated in Latvia’s Election Results

Uldis Ozoliņš | 

Latvia’s 12th Saeima (Parliament) elections on October 4 brought some unexpected results, while maintaining the dominance of present coalition parties. Although the election was fought in dramatic circumstances with Russia’s invasions of Ukraine and growing threats to the Baltic countries, many parties in the campaign made little mention of Ukraine, concentrating on domestic matters, and rather than an atmosphere of tension a curious lethargy was evident, reflected in the low (59%) turnout of voters.

The ‘winner’ of the elections – just – was also the previous largest party, the Moscow-leaning Social-democratic party Harmony (Sociāldemokrātiskā partija Saskaņa), but this time with 24 deputies in the 100-member Saeima, a drop of 7. The party had resolutely refused to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine or cut its ties with Putin’s United Russia party, thereby losing voters but also seeing part of its traditional supporters simply not coming to vote. Just behind Harmony, with 23 deputies came Unity (Vienotība), the previous leading coalition party, an increase of 3 but with some leadership problems.

Also gaining in the elections were the Greens and Farmers Union (Zaļo un zemnieku savienība – ZZS) with 21 deputies, a gain of 8; ZZS is a traditional party with a very divided identity – it is closely allied to Latvia’s timeless oligarch Aivars Lembergs in Ventspils, but also has a very loyal base of farmers and small businesspeople and a very pro-national stance on many issues. The National Alliance (Nacionālā apvienība – NA ) also gained 3 seats to now have 17, being the party most vociferous regarding Russia.

Much of these gains were made at the expense of the Reform Party, the hastily organised grouping after the previous President Valdis Zatler’s initiative to dismiss the Saeima in 2011, and which had 22 seats, but which had since disintegrated.

Unity, ZZS and NA formed the previous coalition, and are widely expected to form the next, but other events showed this would not be business as usual. For a start, the previously dominant Unity ran into severe leadership problems: Latvia’s not always easy to understand electoral system is a proportional representation system: Latvia is divided into five electoral regions, and within each region a party gets the number of deputies proportional to its vote, but with a proviso that it gains 5% of the vote overall to get any deputies at all. Voters thus vote for one party and its list, but within their vote they can select out from among the candidates on the party’s list – voters can put a plus – “+” against an individual candidate’s name which promotes that candidate up the list, or can strike out a candidate, thus demoting them in the list. Unity had its leader and former speaker Solvita Āboltiņa crossed out by sufficient party voters in the western region of Kurzeme, and lost two other ministers as well. Āboltiņa is a strong and feisty woman, and though her professionalism cannot be doubted she was perceived as arrogant and a controller. But more was to come, to which we return below.

New parties in the Saeima

Business cannot continue as normal also because two new parties have entered the Saeima in these elections. One was a party that promoted itsef as a “saviour’” party (Latvia has these regularly) with an extraordiary name which may be translated as ‘For Latvia from my heart’ (No sirds Latvijai – NSL), created by the former Government Auditor Ingūna Sudraba. In her work she established a solid reputation in uncovering many irregularities and corrupt practices, them came into politics but with an increasingly curious profile – she is close to many Russian oligarchs and even figures in the Russian security service. And her offered policies were vague and poorly articulated, but she gained a populist following, pointing to poor government practices that she vowed to change. Some saw her as a pawn of Moscow, some saw her as naive. She gained 7 seats.

However, the big surprise came from elswewhere: the Latvian Regional Alliance (Latvijas reģionu apvienība – LRA) was formed by provincial representatives, disgruntled both with government policy on regional matters, and with ZZS , the traditional regional party. They found a very representable figurehead in Mārtiņš Bondars, former head of President Vīķe-Freiberg’s office, and slowly gained support to finally pick up a surprising 8 seats, also providing the real highlight of the election. While most of their deputies are the respectable regional figures one may expect, one candidate was the very opposite – Artūrs Kaimiņš is a young Riga actor, radio announcer, flim maker and general anarchist, publicly criticising everything the government does, engaging in bizarre stunts, most recently writing to the European Commission warning them to be careful of former Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis’ personal ambitions, as Dombrovskis was angling for a position there! Kaimiņš offered his candidature but the LRA brains trust put him in his place, as 35th on the list of candidates for Riga, where realistically the party could have hoped to win only one or two seats.

Readers of Latvians Online will then be interested in how Kaimiņš went from 35th to number one, and become a deputy: he did it of course through social media, directly addressing the young (no other party in Latvia has ever thought of that!) and interestingly doing it both in Latvia and outside – the many Latvian citizens outside Latvia are allocated to the Riga electorate, and norrmally have little influence on the result. Yet Kaimiņš targeted younger Latvians in Europe who follow Latvian social media, with remarkable results: while most Latvian voters in Western Europe vote for either Unity or the National Alliance, Kaimiņš got the LRA up as the winner in no less then 13 polling places outside of Latvia (including Dublin, Manchester, Birmingham, Bergen, Bradford, Peterborough and Rejkjavik,) and was second top party in half a dozen others including Oslo (by one vote less), Aberdeen, Stockholm and the Hague. And this avalanche of votes and pluses from outside Latvia had tangible results – on the Saturday night the electoral commission’s first solid provisional results gave LRA 7 and Harmony 25 deputies, but as the votes came in from overseas the tide shifted, with LRA picking up the last seat in Riga from Harmony. Anarchy has not been a significant theme in Latvian politics since, say, 1905; it has now returned in novel form. It seems Kaimiņš drew in many younger disaffected voters who may not have participated otherwise; and who did not go to the populist NSL.

Coda

But finally, returning to the big players, the demise of Unity’s Āboltiņa was in strong contrast to the fortunes of Unity’s parliamentary faction leader Dzintars Zaķis, who had become notorious for cheating on taxation and having dubious connections to various oligarchs; at the same time he was useful to the party for kicking heads and doing deals with the Big Boys. Well, in his region of Latgale, he had no worries, ethical matters seem not to weigh heavily on the voters’ minds, and by getting more pluses Zaķis moved up the party list in Latgale from third to first. But, just to show there was cosmic as well as earthly justice in these elections, Zaķis has since been accused of buying votes, paying people to give him a plus. There is considerable interest in the outcome of this development.

 

 

 

12th Saeima Elections – A Few More Weeks

Kārlis Streips | 

The people of Latvia will be going to the polls on October 4 to elect members of the 12th Saeima, or Parliament. 100 seats are up for grabs, and voters are almost spoilt for choice, as there are no fewer than 13 lists of candidates to choose from. True, most of them have virtually no hope whatever of overcoming the 5% vote barrier that is needed to win any seats at all.

What is certain is that four of the five parties that are in the Saeima right now will retain seats there after the election. The exception is the Reform Party that was set up in advance of the previous election by former President Valdis Zatlers, who dissolved the 10th Saeima after becoming entirely fed up with its venal approach toward life and then established his own party, going on to win more than 20 seats. Alas, the party’s faction split up almost before parliamentary work began, the RP nominated several fairly eccentric government ministers who did nothing so much as to annoy the sectors for which they were responsible, and by the time this year’s election rolled around, the party threw in the towel. Some of its more popular and visible members were scooped up by the governing Unity party, but the RP as such remains present only at the local government level.

Unity will certainly return to Parliament. It won’t get anywhere near the nearly one-half of votes that it received in this spring’s European Parliament Election, but it will not do too shabbily. The others that will return without a problem are the Latvian Alliance of the Green Party and Farmers Union (ZZS), the National Alliance (NA), and what is now known as the Social Democratic Harmony Party – the one that grew out of the old far-left For Human Rights in a United Latvia and has undergone various transmogrifications ever since in an attempt to make nice with people outside of its traditional electorate of non-Latvians who are nostalgic about the Soviet Union. Polls right now suggest that Unity and Harmony are at the top of the rankings, with the ZZS and NA lagging behind. One or the other should win the largest number of votes, but as plenty of people who are polled still say that they are undecided, it would be foolhardy to make a guess as to which one it will be. Certainly people at Unity are hoping that they, the ZZS and the NA will win a majority so that they can put together the new governing coalition and leave Harmony, as always, in opposition.

Among the other parties that are contesting the election, the best chances appear to rest with the rather clumsily named From the Heart for Latvia party that was set up by Latvia’s former National Auditor, Inguna Sudraba. Some polls have suggested that the party may overcome the 5% barrier, one going so far as to suggest a rating of nearly 9%.   Coming from the hard left is the Alliance of Latvians in Russia, which is unapologetically pro-Russian, continues to insist that Russian should be a state language in Latvia, continues to insist that citizenship must automatically be given to everyone, has cosy relations with the terrorists in South-eastern Ukraine and Crimea, etc.   Any votes that it gets will come from the Harmony column, and although the alliance is lagging far behind in the polls, experience shows that people who are planning to vote for the hard left sometimes do not tell pollsters that they are planning to do so. Certainly one of the leading lights of the party, Tatjana Zdanoka, found enough support in the European Parliament election to return to Brussels for another five years in spite of the fact that she basically represents Moscow and the Kremlin there, not Latvia as such.

Several other parties have been set up with big hopes, but, as Texans would put it, “that dog won’t hunt.” Former Prime Minister Einars Repše is hoping that people will forget that he was a fairly eccentric prime minister back in the day – raised his own salary as the first order of business after taking office, conducted a big, supposedly anti-corruption-based witch hunt at government agencies with the result that plenty of those who were sacked were later reinstated by the courts, once said that Latvian cinema should not receive any government funding because he personally could not think of even one Latvian movie that he liked, etc.   The peripatetic former transportation minister and deputy mayor of Rīga Ainars Šlesers, for his part, is hoping that people will have forgotten that he was the poster boy for nepotism at the Transportation Ministry, famously once appointing someone to a job at a state-owned company because the man’s father had once been Šlesers’ chauffeur. He has brought together some true dinosaurs of Latvian politics, including Jānis Jurkāns, who was Latvia’s first post-independence foreign minister, spent some time in hopeless opposition in Parliament, and has been gone from politics for a while now, former Prime Minister (twice) Ivars Godmanis, who lost his seat in the European Parliament when the party from which he had been elected (one of Šlesers’ many political projects during the past decade and more) dissolved, and, God help us, former Prime Minister Aigars Kalvītis, who presided over the orgy of spending that drove Latvia straight into the ditch when the global financial crisis erupted in 2007 and 2008.   In both cases, it appears that there is little chance that the parties will win any seats at all.

Beyond that there are the usual more or less loony tunes – a party called Sovereignty, a party called Growth, a party called Freedom: Freedom from Fear, Hatred and Anger, the New Conservative Party, the Latvian Alliance of Regions, and so on. Almost certainly losers one and all.

Inasmuch as there has been mudslinging in this campaign, it has primarily been focused on Unity, which has led the government since March 2009 and may be suffering a bit of road fatigue insofar as the electorate is concerned, and on Sudraba and her party, apparently because she and it are seen as the biggest threat against the established parties. In the former case, some fuss has been raised about the fact that several visible Unity people (as well as the country’s defence minister, who comes from the ZZS) went on holiday this past summer with a man representing a company that earlier this month was chosen by the Cabinet of Ministers in a process that was rather less than transparent to become the lead investor in Latvia’s Citadele Bank. In Sudraba’s case, there have been many claims from others that she is a Trojan horse for Russian interests in Latvia, though little in the way of hard evidence in support of that claim has been produced and presented. Worse for her has been the fact that several members of her own party, including a few who were actually on the party’s candidate list, resigned earlier this year, with some of them going to law enforcement agencies to claim that documents were forged when the party was founded.

The campaign has been a comparatively quiet one, largely because a few years ago Parliament voted to ban television advertising for a month before an election. This has led parties to focus on radio, the Internet, outdoor advertising and direct mail. A few times a week I find party “newsletters” in my mailbox (and toss them into the bin straight away).   Sudraba’s face is on billboards all around Riga, while many mini-buses are decorated with the photogenic image of Mārtiņš Bondars from the Alliance of Regions. Latvian Television and Radio Latvia give all of the candidate lists free airtime as a matter of law, debates are being held on television and radio, but TV ads are gone. That is all for the best.

Foreign policy is traditionally not much of a focus for Latvia’s political parties during election campaigns, and that remains true today. In the face of Russia’s ongoing misbehaviour in the geopolitical world, Unity, the ZZS and the NA all talk in their campaign platforms about strengthening defence, raising the defence budget, developing the Latvian Home Guard, and so on. The Harmony platform says nothing whatsoever about foreign policy at all, which is probably logical seeing as how the party probably would like everyone to forget that it is still an agreement-based partner of Vladimir Putin’s dictator party in Russia and that Harmony has been all over the map in relation to the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine.

To summarise, it is likely that the next Saeima will be rather similar to the present one, with the possible exception of the Sudraba party. For Latvian citizens who live abroad, I would suggest that there are really no more than two sensible choices. Unity has led Latvia out of the economic crisis, and although it is not at all perfect, it is the logical choice for those who wish to continue down the path of economic reform and international co-operation. The National Alliance is rather much too xenophobic for my tastes, but there are those in the electorate who favour its “everything for Latvia” approach to life. The ZZS in my view is disqualified both because it is utterly abnormal for pesticide-using farmers and environmental activists to be in a single party and because the party still has its agreement with the Ventspils Party and its venal boss, Aivars Lembergs. I absolutely cannot and will not recommend a vote for anyone else. A vote cast for a party that does not reach 5% is a vote wasted, because such votes will be redistributed among the parties that have surpassed the barrier, and so a vote for a petty party may mean accidentally voting for Harmony and its pro-Russian interests. Certainly I hope that citizens will make the effort to go to the polls on October 4 or have already voted by mail. I know that in many countries Latvian election precincts are far, far away. In Canada, for instance, precincts can only be open in official diplomatic facilities, which means Ottawa and Toronto, and that does nothing for someone in Alberta or Vancouver. But at the end of the day we are all co-responsible for the future of our country. We live in terribly complex times, and it is of utmost importance to elect a Saeima and, thus, a government that is sensible. This relates not only to Russia’s aggression, but also to the fact that during the first half of next year, Latvia will be the presiding country of the European Union. No time for fools.

Kārlis Streips was born in Chicago, studied journalism at the University of North Illinois and University of Maryland. He moved to Latvia in 1991 where he has worked as a TV and radio journalist. He also works as a translator and lecturer at the University of Latvia.

The Speech That Angela Merkel Did Not Make

Uldis Ozoliņš | 

Latvia is among all the countries in Eastern Europe watching with trepidation as Russian aggression unfolds in Ukraine. When Putin annexed the Crimea, and sent his forces into Ukraine, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel might have at any stage, but did not, give this speech:

“In late December of 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed a law making the promotion of separatism in Russia illegal; any action aimed at separatism in any part of the Russian Federation, or even advocacy of such separatism, has become illegal.

Since January, however, the same President Putin has done nothing but engaged in separatism – first in Crimea – which is a legitimate and internationally recognized part of Ukraine, and since then in Ukraine itself. These actions were carried out accompanied by systematic lying about Russia’s intentions and involvement, and all too quickly revealed to be lies.

Two other palpable lies have been broadcast by Putin to justify his actions. One is that he is carrying out such military activity, with thinly disguised and fraudulent referendums in areas his forces control, in order to protect Russians, or so-called ‘Russian-speakers’. This, significantly, has been a constant theme of all Russian efforts to destabilize all those countries that were part of the Soviet Union and were only too willing to leave the Soviet empire. The truth is that there is not one Russian – anywhere in Eastern Europe – who is under threat. I repeat, not one Russian is under threat in Eastern Europe, not one who needs protection from anything. Neither is the Russian language under threat; it is widely used and respected. That is the reality. But the lie continues.

The second major lie that has come with Russia’s aggression is that Ukraine no longer has a legitimate government but is now in the hands of usurpers and – most of all – fascists. Well, I am sorry, but President Putin is wrong on both counts. The Ukrainian Maidan revolution was a democratic revolution, carried out by Ukrainian citizens – including many Russians in Ukraine – against a corrupt and disgraceful government that President Putin believed he could manipulate as he liked. Putin, it seems, cannot recognise democracy, but chose to support those who tried to suppress democracy, through thuggery and criminal sniper attacks and murder. His present actions are a consequence of his failure to be able to manipulate Ukraine through his puppet.

The second claim – that Ukraine has been overtaken by fascists, is a lie, but a lie where this time the German nation itself has something to say. We know something about fascism, and something about how fascism can be stopped, and we will not be lectured about fascism by Putin, who turns out this out-of-date bombastic rhetoric about fascism when anyone or any state chooses not to go along with Russian bidding.

But the historical record shows a number of inconvenient truths about this grandstanding on fascism: we know, that one of the great crimes of the 20th century was not Nazi Germany alone, but Nazi Germany in partnership with the Soviet Union beginning World War II, when the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact in 1939 saw Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in a perfectly friendly partnership dividing up Eastern Europe between them. Starting with Poland, divided up between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, to begin World War II. Until Hitler turned on the Soviet Union in 1941, no criticism was made of fascism.

We Germans know what fascism was and Maidan was the very opposite of fascism. We also know how to stop fascism: after World War II and the harm that fascism had done to the world and not least to Germany itself, we pursued a policy of lustration, where it was impossible for any significant figure in the Nazi party or Gestapo to ever hold public office. Such a policy was not pursued when the Soviet Union was dissolved. The Soviet Union has always been acknowledged in its victory over Nazi Germany, but then it proceeded to set up its own authoritarian regimes, which were often just as oppressive as what it had overthrown.

Now, Putin must be careful his own state is not defined as having all the marks of fascism itself. Very telling here is Putin’s use of the ethnic argument – protecting Russians – that Hitler used of Germans in other countries, before World War II.

I mention these historical truths because the Russian people have been lied to terribly, and not by President Putin alone. They have been lied to for most of the last 97 years – and most significantly lied to about their own history and realities, as well as lied to about the rest of the world and its attitude to Russia. His control over the media in Russia makes this lying complete. No country has any desire in relation to Russia except to live in peace with it. The only country not wanting such a peace is Russia itself.

And finally, a piece of legislation in Russia this year that some may have missed was a law making it a criminal offence to criticise or to cast aspersions on any aspect of Soviet behaviour during World War II, including the behaviour of the Soviet Army. Anyone criticising that army of 70 years ago faces criminal prosecution.

President Putin shows appalling judgment in the laws he promotes. Or rather, perhaps the laws he passes are a good guide to his future actions. Just as the law against separatism in Russia shows the hypocrisy of promoting separatism in Ukraine, so the law on criticism of the Soviets and the Soviet Army in World War II only serves to draw attention to it and to any actions of the present Russian army in a new war. Speaking from this place, I can only say that the people of Eastern Europe, and let me say specifically the women of Berlin, have not forgotten the Red Army and its behaviour.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unacceptable and must be reversed. The fog of lies that enshrouds this aggression must be exposed for the hypocrisy it is.“

Angela Merkel, the one leader in Europe with the obvious stature to challenge Putin, did not make this speech or anything like it, but has chosen an uncertain private telephone diplomacy instead, urged keeping lines of communication open, stressed the need for good relations with Russia, and tended to see the Ukrainian situation as an internal issue only. This could have grave consequences for all of Europe, not least Latvia. Putin seems confident that Germany will not be too harsh in its response to his aggression. The danger is that, parallel to the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact, we may have a Merkel-Putin pact to divide Europe into spheres of influence once again.