All About Latvia

It is a sad day for Latvian people.

This morning, with 58 votes, Saeima voted for the Anointed Valdis Zatlers, MD, to become the next Latvian president. Since early morning outside the parliament building in the Old Town two camps chanted names of their favorites, which at one point transformed into a shouting match, as if whoever shouts the loudest wins.

The Zatlers crowd held favorable portraits of their candidate. I was surprised they found any. Dressed in medical uniforms, young men and women shouted “Zatlers, Zatlers,” often encouraged by a man with a man-purse, who looked like he was in charge. I wouldn’t be surprised if some in the Zatlers crowd belonged to a Rent-A-Crowd company. Nowadays, democratic opposition can be bought.

On the other side of the street, people of various ages wore T-shirts, that read Aivars Endzins – People’s President. They chanted Endzins for President, Zatlers for Doctor. A few people stood around listening to the parliamentary proceedings on the radio.

The police separated the two camps, which mostly behaved very peacefully. The police gave way to tourists and other passers by.

The shouting match between the two camps suggested a need to reform the system where the President is elected by the Parliament alone. This is the first time in Latvia’s history two presidential candidates met for public debates. This is the first time in Latvia’s history supporters of two candidates gathered near the parliament to make their voices heard.

And this is the first time in my recent memory, the Parliament voted in a person opposed by so many organizations.

Cynical Latvian public already views democratic processes and the ruling gang with great suspicion. Politicians can be bought and most of them are, people say. Political elite in this small Baltic state ostracizes the people they’re supposed to serve farther and farther. Both notions supported by the farce of a presidential campaign and the results of the presidential election.

According to polls, most people wanted to see Endzins as their president, yet the ruling coalition pushed for its own candidate. People wanted to see Endzins because Zatlers at this point appears to be nothing else but a marionette in hands of oligarchs.

The election of Zatlers, a doctor with practically no political experience, signifies the tighter hold on power by what some editorials call “a gang that rules our country,” or the coalition government, and, the continued sale of Latvia’s independence to foreign entities in particular to our immediate East.

Opponents of gay pride parade often use declining demographic numbers as an argument against legalization of gay marriage, or a same-sex union before the state. The angry mob held religious icons, sprinkled holy water in front of the Hotel Latvia last year where gay and lesbians gathered for a conference.

Somewhere beneath the anti-gay sentiment and anger lay the real problems. For example, if it hadn’t been for abortions performed in this country, the birth rate would have surpassed the death rate in 2003.

In 2004 in Latvia the rate of induced abortions per 1000 live births has decreased by 28 percent, comparing to 1999 and by 2.5 percent comparing to 2003. In 2004, there were 674 induced
abortions per 1000 live births. Similar trend can be observed in Lithuania and Estonia. However, in Baltic States the number of induced abortions is high comparing to other European countries. For example, in 2003 in Sweden there were 347 induced
abortions per 1000 live births, in Finland – 189. In these countries the rate of induced abortions has not changed during the last years.

Although, a ban on abortion isn’t going to increase the birth rate, I suspect creating favorable economic conditions for mothers and family would.

The life expectancy — the lowest in the EU — is only the tip of the iceberg.

Following the demise of the Soviet Union, Latvia has become one of the major hubs for child trafficking, sex slaves, and prostitution.

Of all social ills that affect Latvia today, anger over celebration of consensual homosexual relationships seem misdirected.

This made me chuckle.

Latvian Chapter of Transparency International, which is known as Delna here in Latvia, translated an interview with the anointed presidential candidate Valdis Zatlers. The interview was published in a daily Diena this week. Nominated as a single candidate from a four-party ruling coalition, Zatlers M.D., as it was reported, admitted to taking money in envelopes from patients as a gesture of gratitude. He doesn’t seem to feel bad about it, nor does he even remember how much money he had taken.

What message would we be sending to the world if we elect the president a person who had admitted to accepting cash from his patients.

During a live public-affairs show on Latvian TV earlier this week, Zatlers received the least number of votes as a result of a phone survey. He came across as ignorant in the simple matters of the state, particularly when he said he didn’t know and didn’t want to know the oligarchs, even though the President recently said she was afraid oligarchs have been getting more power in the country.

But the interview speaks volumes about the Anointed Doctor.

The Parliament is scheduled to vote for the next president on Thursday. Chances are it’s going to be the first round of election. Delna is organizing a picket that day near the Parliament to encourage the MPs to vote for the former Constitutional Court judge Aigars Endzins as the next president of Latvia.

I plan to go there.

Pictured is Valdis Zatlers with a nameless bunny. Photo was taken from Zatlers.blogspot.com, a site created by an independent group of people opposing the election of Zatlers as the next president of Latvia.

Latvian families will flood a Riga city park with balloons and games to celebrate themselves this afternoon. The second annual Family Holidays aim to promote family values in the Latvian society, just one week ahead of the gay pride parade.

Undoubtedly, churches and conservative religious movements in the country created Family Holidays last year to counterbalance what is perceived as gay propaganda and brainwashing in this very conservative Baltic country.

In the last two years Gay Pride parades organized by the GLBT group Mozaika exposed Latvian intolerance to homosexuality on the international arena.

In 2005, the pride attracted more onlookers than participants. Conservative and uber-patriotic groups on both sides of the political spectrum united to combat the same enemy, homosexuality. Rotten tomatoes and eggs were thrown in.

In 2006, the parade was unlawfully banned because high-ranking officials said it might threaten the peace and stability in the country. Faced with the ban, the group chose to host a conference inside Hotel Latvija. But it didn’t stop defenders of the traditional families to throw bags full of dog feces and sprinkle holy water on the conference participants.

At that time, I blamed the disorder on a Web site called nopride.lv, created to fight promotion of homosexuality in the country. People, wearing white t-shirts with craftily created logo of two men (you can tell they’re men by their stick penises) engaging in sexual acts, stood outside the hotel chanting anti-gay slogans. The red circle around them and red line across the stick men on the logo were meant to show the people’s displeasure with the act.

The creator of the site, Igors Maslakovs says that last year’s disorder wasn’t his fault.

“It wasn’t my goal,” he told this site in a recent interview. “My goal was to stop the gay pride parade.”

Those who were seen responsible for the disorder that day one year are now in court; Maslakovs himself is not part of the proceedings.

Maslakovs opposes the gay pride parade because from his experience with similar events in other countries, gay pride parades have little to do with homosexuality itself, but a lot to do with exhibitionism that men and women use to show their naked bodies in public. For him, gay pride parade is an exported idea for quite, mostly reserved Latvians.

It maybe okay there, but it’s not okay here.

Latvians cannot allow someone from France, UK, or Sweden dictate how we are to live our lives, he said. Most of the participants are speaking English, they’re not Latvians, he says.

“Latvian gays are not obsessed with these problems,” he says.

Each country creates their own rules, he said. France, for example, allows gay parade, but bans gay marriage. In Latvia, which suffered a lot demographically in the last decade, it would be a bad government policy to recognize gay marriage.

“From a medical point of view, not a single person in the world was born of homosexuals,” he said.

Maslakovs, however, draws the line at hating homosexuals themselves.

“No one beats homosexuals on the streets here,” he said. “We’re not hating homosexuals, we’re trying to protect our country with any instruments we have.”

Some scientific research of the public opinion suggests that public tolerance toward homosexuality decreased in the last 12 months. However Latvian society doesn’t support any changes to public policies regarding gays and lesbians in either more conservative or more liberal direction. Overall, compete or partial support for homosexual lifestyle decreased from 62 to 51 percent, according to a recent study (PDF, in Latvian).

This year, the city fathers said there was no reason to ban or postpone the parade, which is scheduled to take place next Saturday at the very same park where the Family Holidays are coming to a close.

Disregard everything I’ve said about presidential candidates up until this point. It doesn’t matter any more.

Yesterday, the ruling coalition — or “a gang” as some in the local media call it — agreed on one candidate: a local doctor, a head of a local hospital Valdis Zatlers. The four-party coalition presented Zalters, MD, as an independent candidate. He came following weeks of political theater known as “Electing the President,” when large parties in the coalition nominated their own candidates one by one.

Now it’s widely believed to be smokescreen. As their candidates roamed around state offices gently pleading for support of other coalition parties, someone had a plan.

Since then, we learned that Zatlers took money in envelopes from his patients, which in most countries is known as bribery. Granted, it’s a culture here to give a doctor “something nice” for doing his job, yet the question whether he paid any taxes on those gifts remains in the air.

Zatlers kept the best implants for himself while insisting other doctors use implants of a worse quality. This independent candidate signed the ruling “People’s Party” manifesto.

As Peteris observed, “Unfortunately, as Aivars Ozolins points out in his searing editorial, the fact that Dr. Zatlers was willing to play this rôle is a bad beginning from which he may never rise. The Latvian President has few powers, but Vaira Vike-Freiberga has proven how important they can be if wisely used. The coalition has once again shown that the voters, and indeed the people of Latvia, do not matter at all.”

This is Latvian politics at its best. And worst.

And today Saskanas Centrs, a left-of-center opposition party, nominated a former head of the Constitutional Court Aivars Endzins. Although SC is a bloc which includes reformed communists, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Endzins would be a true independent president if he is elected.

Endzins has proven himself to be a rarity in Latvian politics — an independent voice among the yea-sayers. He voted for the country’s independence in 1990. He graduated from Moscow State University. In 1988, he served in the Popular Front of Latvia. He’s been really outspoken about what’s going on in the country as the chief of the legislative branch and after that. He’s not afraid to show his independent thinking and he would be an ideal candidate for the country’s highest post.

And people respect him. In the last two hours when the news broke, the story received 64 comments on the portal VDiena. Most people are expressing doubt that the gang that rules this country will allow someone like Endzins to be elected as the next president. An independent think-tank for open government already called on Sandra Kalniete to withdraw her candidacy from the post (she didn’t stand a chance anyway) in favor of Endzins.

And I suspect she will do that. Tonight.

Update: 2305 EET Speaking during a public affairs show on the national TV, Sandra Kalniete withdrew her candidacy for the post of the president in favor of Aivars Endzins. At the end of the show, Endzins received 15421 votes from TV shows viewers.

“The Polish problem is a European problem. The Lithuanian and Estonian problems are also EU problems. It is very important if you want to have close co-operation to understand that the EU is based on principles of solidarity.”

– Jose Manuel Barroso
European Commission chief May 18, 2007. source.

Who will be the next president? I don’t know.

Who is running for the post? I don’t know.

And that’s 10 days before the election. Worry not, though, Latvian citizens don’t get to elect their leader. It’s the job they entrust to their public servants, whom they don’t elect directly.

Some names, of course, have been thrown around for quite some time.

“I don’t remember his name, but you know he’s young, slim, and handsome,” said a Russian-speaking woman about one candidate for the president on the Latvian National Radio.

She was talking about the 44-year-old Maris Riekstins (pictured here), the chief of staff in the office of the prime minister and a former ambassador to the U.S. The ruling Tautas Partija (People’s Party, or TP) nominated Riekstins to be the next resident in the Riga Castle.

Presidential elections are slated to take place next Thursday in Parliament. Last week the coalition partners have been meeting with candidates already as they have until Thursday to nominate their candidates officially.

Most the next president is going to be a relative unknown and not one of the three nominated by the parties.

Politically, the president is supposed to be above the party influence because he or she ought to be able to stand up to the political pressure from the legislature.

President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, whose term expires on July 7, rose to the challenge when she stopped two laws from taking an effect before people offered their opinion on a referendum. It’s unclear if any of the current candidates would have done the same.

Parties are now debating the merits of two candidates from the ruling coalition, however most discussions are taking place behind closed doors, which frustrates people such as myself, who support the government transparency.

None of the parties holds the 51-vote majority in the Saema needed to appoint the next president. The ruling coalition, which holds a slim majority in the 100-member parliament, failed to come up with a single candidate after a coalition partner Latvijas Pirma Partija nominated its own former integration minister and minister of culture Karina Petersone for the post.

I was hoping for a pretty girl.

It’s a single guy’s dream, you know. Traveling alone on an
international flight in hopes to meet a sophisticated, smart,
educated, well-versed, gorgeous woman. And madly fall in love with her. Or at least get her number.

It must only happen in movies because every time I travel, my wish never comes true. This time, an airline staff member placed a young, smart, sophisticated dude next to me, who wasn’t even into talking with a strange “furriner” near him. The only time we exchanged any words was during the departure from Chicago. As I looked out of the airplane window, I saw Milwaukee lit up like Baghdad during the shock and awe. Only without the casualties of course. It was still America. The city looked bright yellow and gorgeous from up high.

“Wow. Look at that,” I told my unfortunate companion, who too might have been hoping for a woman seat partner.

He looked at the view. He mumbled something along the lines of Mmm-hmm. And then reclined back in his seat. Can you really sum up that view with the monosyllabic expression.

We ate in silence. We slept next to each other in silence. We were true men. No unnecessary words were exchanged. None at all.

Not that I longed for a company, you see.

Back at O’Hare during boarding, I did befriend one passenger. A much older gentleman, probably in his 80s, who was going to Norway to meet up with his Norwegian wife. She came over to the States after the war and three weeks ago, she went on her frequent trip to Norway to visit family and friends. And now, my nameless friend was following her. He was a pleasant man, well-versed in the today’s politics and history. He sounded like a retired executive or some high-ranking individual in a company. We talked about the Michigan’s economy, and the Great Depression. He was a well-spoken kind old man, but he had one major flaw — He never heard of Latvia.

Then, the boarding started and in this havoc I lost him. I saw him once again in Copenhagen when I had to empty my pockets for a carry-in luggage check. But he was far away and I didn’t feel like raising the security level to red.

From Chicago, the flight felt long. Leaving late at night has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was going through the customs without hardly any crowd gathered at the x-ray machines.

The disadvantage was that at the takeoff, flight attendants began
offering us food when I felt like closing my eyes and trying to get
some sleep.

On the connecting flight to Riga though another man peeked my curiosity. It was more about his appearance than anything else. His long silver hair laid on his shoulders. Somewhere his head hair met with his long beard hair, but I couldn’t tell where one ended and another started. He was going bald on the top of his head.

Each of his five fingers boasted several silver rings that covered his whole knuckle. Each with a different emblem and each, I suppose, symbolized something different. A silver bracelet adorned his right wrist. He wore a green shirt, but apparently whoever made the shirt just smeared green all over it,
leaving some white stripes along the way. He must have loved it at first sight. He wore striped pants held on his slim waste by a giant belt with silver holes in it. The narrow stripes of red, brown, yellow lines on his pants connected his belt to more amusing red winter socks placed on his feet.

During the flight, he sat Turkish style right across from me and another gentleman. His feet were folded under his bottom on
his seat. When a flight attendant approached, in his perfect English
he ordered a half-liter can of a Latvian beer, Lacplesis. Maybe he just wanted a beer and this being a Latvian airline they only serve Latvian beer. I didn’t know. I noticed him again when we boarded the bus to ride to the airplane. He was the last one to leave the bus, even though I politely offered him to go first. Without saying a word, he just raised his ring-ridden hand and showed me to the door. I proceeded with a smile.

Perhaps he is an non-reformed hippie. Well, he is definitely a
non-conformist, secure in his bearded manliness and hip pants, which he must have gotten out of his time machine closet. Maybe he stopped shopping in 1979. I wonder about his purpose for coming to Riga. Travel? Visit relatives? Is he a former Latvian who immigrated to the West those long years ago? My questions were answered later when I found out that he is a Latvian American coming from Los Angeles to visit relatives.

At the airport, an old woman met the bearded hippie. They took a cab before me and took off.

***
I suspected that my cab driver, who are notoriously of a questionable character in Riga, was under the influence of alcohol. I also suspected he was taking advantage of me,
but I decided to let him. He took me home through a different part of town, saying that traffic is likely to be hideous. I let him have it
and paid about 20 dollars. The man was up in his years. An ethnic Latvian, he appear to hate everything that’s Russian.

“Wherever you find a Russian, there is also a bardak,” he said referring to the Russian word for chaos. Some Latvians took to this word as their own.

We chatted about local politics, in particular once I told him that I was a reporter back in the States.

“So you found your dream in America?” he asked. I told him that I was still looking. Maybe the dream is here in Latvia.