All About 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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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