Friday, June 15, 2007

Latvian presidential election, two weeks later

The two weeks since Valdis Zatlers became the next Latvian president have been quite predictable:
  • Zatlers has visited State Revenue Service, to settle the taxes on cash gifts that he, as a doctor, received from his patients. State Revenue Service has also called other doctors to pay taxes on their gifts. So far, only three other doctors have responded. Meanwhile, the public debate on appropriateness of those gifts is continuing at full speed.
  • Shortly before the election, our current president Vaira Vike-Freiberga accused the ethnically-Russian party Saskanas Centrs of being disloyal to Latvia (my guess: she meant they are being funded by Putin's administration). Saskanas Centrs threatened to sue her for libel. Vike-Freiberga claimed that she has a classified information that Saskanas Centrs is disloyal and refused to make it public. We have not heard about a possible Saskanas Centrs lawsuit since then.
  • The Delna organization that organized the anti-Zatlers demonstration near the Latvian parliament during the presidential vote is looking for donations. The demonstration of 500-1000 people had cost 20,000 euros to organize! Those protests are expensive...
  • Someone has created an unofficial Zatlers homepage at valdiszatlers.com and offers to sell the domain to the highest bidder. The website contains three paragraphs on Zatlers and his picture. Amusingly, half of the text has been copied word-by-word from this post on my weblog.
  • Social Democratic party is gathering signatures in support of a referendum that would change the Latvian constitution and make the president elected directly by people, rather than by the parliament. But now, after our parliament voted for the less popular of the two candidates two weeks ago, its chances of passing are higher than ever!
Index to my previous posts on the presidential election.

3 comments:

Aleks said...

Re: Saskanas Centrs. VVF's "detailed" explanation was not that detailed. It contained just one sentence saying that she was expressing her personal and subjective opinion based on the secret information at hand which she was not going to reveal.

I'd say, you know something, come out with it. Otherwise, keep the secret information secret. At least that's honest and worth of VVF....

Anonymous said...

Well follow the unwritten rule ! If you knw more bring it public! if it is secret info -hold it secret! You have are a good blogger hold it so ! Paldies

Latvian abroad said...

VVF is not willing to explain more amd Saskanas Centrs is not trying to sue her any more, either...

I trust her too much to think she was inventing acccusations out of the blue... but what exactly she meant remains a mystery.