All About Latvia

RIGA – I went to listen to the president speak yesterday at the Saeima and I almost fell asleep. If leaders are supposed to be inspirational, Latvia’s President Valdis Zatlers was not. It is best to listen to his speech before you go to bed.

But the speech was good. Zatlers called on members of parliament to heed to call of the electorate (yeah, right!), following the Saturday’s political circus, or to put it the boringly, the Referendum on the Constitutional Amendments. More than 600,000 allegedly apathetic Latvians for a moment set a keg of beer aside and went to the polls to tell the government what they thought of it.

The government told them they were wrong and it knew better.

The zoo-elected president, Zatlers now has another chance to earn some political capital that may even carry him into the second term. The silver-haired doctor has a chance to heal the nation. To fix political crisis in our little kingdom, Zatlers can dissolve the parliament and, I believe, he would keep his job in a national referendum. The question is how long it will take him to make that decision.

The president appeared to give the parliament until Christmas to decide on constitutional amendments drafted by a group of legal experts that do indeed give voters a right to call snap elections but with harsher restrictions so not to destabilize the country.

Stability has been a token of dictatorship though and I find it very interesting that we find ourselves in a similar situation as back in May 1934, on the eve of the Murder of Democracy when Latvia’s Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis dissolved the parliament and became a de facto dictator. A day before his coup d’etat, the parliament voted in second reading on amendments to allow voters a right to dissolve the assembly. The bill never went to the third reading as the parliament was dissolved under the pretext of re-writing the constitution.

Chances of a benevelent dictator stepping out of the shadows in the modern-day Latvia is unlikely. What is likely, however, is the continual denial of those in power that people just don’t know any better until it is too late. Add a good dose of the economic crisis and you’ve got a good political and economic climate for a revolution.

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