MOSCOW. (Alexander Vasilyev for RIA Novosti) - On May 31, the Latvian parliament chose a new president at its plenary session.
This is the country's third president since the restoration of Latvia's independence and the seventh in its entire history.
A little history
Let's get one thing straight right away - Latvia is a parliamentary republic and the president's role is limited by the constitution. Presidential powers in Latvia in no way compare with those in France, America or Russia. A Latvian president is similar to the British queen, who reigns rather than rules.
However, Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga has proved that she can make the MPs' easy-going life much more difficult by making the most of the few instruments at her disposal. Her skill at doing so is particularly striking when compared with the policies of her predecessor, Guntis Ulmanis. Many political analysts describe him as a pale shadow of his once almighty ancestor, Karlis Ulmanis, who ruled Latvia single-handedly in the 1930s.
Since the beginning of her presidency, Vaira Vike-Freiberga has not been shy of rejecting numerous bills that, in her opinion, needed more work. Members of the Saeima, Latvia's parliament, had to make sure their "homework" was up to par. The president demonstrated her strong character more than once and was not scared of an open clash with the ruling coalition. She displayed her strong will for the last time when the MPs ignored her warning and accepted inadequate amendments to two bills on security-related services. The leaders of the ruling coalition thought that she was unlikely to start a public row on the eve of her departure from the presidential post.
But they were wrong. The president took the unprecedented step of calling for a national referendum on these bills. Only then did the leaders of the ruling parties understood that in a situation where their ratings were several times lower than hers, the referendum could essentially be turned into a vote of no-confidence.
To some extent, this is what happened. Although the ruling parties immediately backpedaled and cancelled the amendments, the Central Election Committee collected even more signatures than were required for a referendum. Exit polls showed that many Latvians demanded a referendum as a means of protest - not because they were well-versed in the legal nuances of the suggested amendments. Symbolically, the referendum will take place on July 7, when the current president will leave her post.
How it all began
There was no indication that the 1999 presidential elections would bring to power such a bright personality as Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who would be a serious contender for the post of UN secretary general in seven years. Today, many Latvian politicians claim in real earnest that they were able to discern Latvia's would-be Iron Lady in the modest Canadian professor of psychology a year before these historic elections. In any case, many Latvians still remember the moving television story - how on a late June evening in 1999, after several unsuccessful rounds of voting, Latvian Social Democratic leader Juris Bojars led a modestly dressed and little-known middle-aged woman - Latvia's future president - by the hand into the hall of the Saeima.
In the absence of new nominees acceptable to the majority, Vike-Freiberga easily received 53 votes, a majority, by secret ballot, although she had come to Latvia not long before and had only a vague idea about the Latvian reality. Probably, political schemers hoped that for this reason she would be easy to manipulate.
In the Soviet era, Vike-Freiberga had visited her historical homeland with delegations of Western scholars. Yet her ideas about Latvia are mostly rooted in her memories as a child. The tragic reminiscences of how her family had to flee to the West under pressure from the advancing Soviet Army in the fall of 1944 play no small role here.
They probably explain her wary attitude to everything Soviet and, partly, Russian. This is why she blurted out an awkward and scornful remark about the veterans of the Great Patriotic War who were celebrating their victory by "drinking vodka with vobla (dried, salted fish) on a newspaper and singing their chastushki (a type of a limerick)."
Getting ready for elections
Recalling the setbacks of the past, Latvian politicians started getting ready for the 2007 presidential elections well in advance. During the campaign for elections to the Saeima last year, the influential party Jaunais Laiks (New Time) nominated Sandra Kalniete, a former activist of the Popular Front and a recent European commissioner, to run for the presidency. But its relatively modest results in the elections and the excessive ambitions of its leaders made it impossible for the party to take part in the ruling coalition. The idea was sunk by squabbling in Kalniete's party - she could not count on the support of even her own deputies.
The Tautas (People's) Party, which forms the backbone of the ruling coalition, took a different road. Keeping the names of its nominees a secret, it did everything to consolidate its power, discipline the ruling coalition and assign its members to key government positions. It only became known two months before the voting that it had nominated the former state secretary of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whom Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis persuaded to leave his prestigious and comfortable position as Latvian ambassador to the United States in order to head the State Chancellery.
Evil tongues claimed that the prime minister himself would not object to becoming president. But in that case, a new government would have to be formed. The mounting contradictions between the four parties of the ruling coalition were not likely to produce the desired compromise. Besides, secret voting in the Saeima could bring some unpleasant surprises for Kalvitis. It was more sensible not to risk it.
The Tautas Party's plans were somewhat upset by its ambitious supporters - the coalition of the Latvijas Pirma Partijas (First Party of Latvia) and the Latvijas Cels (Latvian Way) parties. They nominated Karina Petersone, the former minister for social integration. In this case, neither of the ruling parties' two nominees could count on the unequivocal support of the parliamentary majority. At that point, the Tautas Party proposed the candidacy of its active supporter Valdis Zatlers, the head of the Riga Hospital of Trauma Surgery and Orthopedics for many years. This seemingly independent figure was backed by the majority of the ruling coalition despite the fact that in his first interviews as a presidential nominee he admitted that he had accepted undeclared cash payments from his patients. This sounded rather ambiguous for a presidential nominee who had put battling corruption high on his list of priorities.
But this was not the last surprise of the presidential campaign. A week before the elections, the parliamentary faction of the Harmony Center, a left-wing opposition party, nominated the former chairman of the Constitutional Court, Aivars Endzins. This move could have been ignored, but he did quite well in the first televised debates and won several times more votes than the ruling parties' nominee. According to the last public opinion poll, 54.3% of the respondents wanted Endzins to be president.
Several days before the voting in the Saiema, the two main candidates had almost equal chances to win. Under the circumstances, Vike-Freiberga intervened in the election campaign. In an interview with the Latvian radio she was critical of both nominees, Endzins above all. Having reminded the audience of his communist past, she stressed that he was the nominee of the left-wing opposition. She said that she had information that its election campaign might have been funded by disloyal sources but did not present any specific evidence implicating the Harmony Center.
The year's main event
Election Day did not justify the hopes of sensation-seeking journalists. While opposing rallies in support of the two candidates confronted each other, loudly chanting the names of their nominees and singing songs behind the Saeima's walls, the MPs carried out their debates and secret voting in less than two hours. The candidate of the ruling coalition, Valdis Zatlers, was elected president with 58 votes as against 39 votes received by the seasoned lawyer Endzins.
Once again, the Latvian policymakers preferred to nominate unaffiliated people. They might have their own reasons for that. Time will tell whether their dark horse will justify their hopes or turn into a grinning Queen of Spades.
Alexander Vasilyev is a member of the RIA Novosti Expert Council.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
