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.

Latvian presidential election: campaign notes

In 29 hours, the Latvian parliament will gather to vote on the next president of Latvia. There are two candidates: Valdis Zatlers and Aivars Endzins. The latest news from the election campaign:

1. The mudslinging continues! Instead of having a substantive debate on the issues, both campaigns are trying to find ethics flaws with the other candidate. People's Party (which supports Zatlers) has re-published fragments from a book that Aivars Endzins wrote 30 years ago, during the Soviet period. In this book, Endzins denies that Soviet Union ever occupied Latvia by military force and claims that Latvia had joined Soviet Union voluntarily. And there is more of Soviet propaganda in his book.
   
   My opinion of Endzins just took a big, big hit. I know that joining Communist Party was a pre-requisite for many careers in Soviet Union (particularly, careers that invoved managing other people). But, there is a difference between
   
   (a) joining Communist Party and doing the minimum required amount (e.g., paying some amount in membership fees and attending meetings once in a while) and
   
   (b) actively producing propaganda nonsense on behalf of the Communist regime.
   
   I can fully understand the first but I have much less understanding for the second. If a person in Soviet Union wanted to pursue a career that did not involve writing propaganda books, there were certainly options for that!
2. There might be yet another candidate! Egils Levits, a Latvian judge on the Court of Justice of European Communities, says that he has been informally contacted by politicians. It's possible that parties behind Zatlers and Endzins reach a deal on Levits as a compromise candidate before tomorrow's vote.

Tomorrow might be interesting. Stay tuned...

UPDATE (30/05/07): Endzins is trying to justify his past writings and comes off quite pathetically. The fellow historians are quite skeptical and say that one could work as an academic historian in Soviet Union without writing what Endzins wrote. Our current president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga also came down on Endzins quite hard, for both writing Soviet propoganda in 1970s and 1980s and for awarding bonuses to himself as the Chairman of the Constitutional Court. She was even harsher about the "Saskanas Centrs" (Harmony Centre) party which nominated Endzins:

About their funding, I, as a president, have certain confidential information that makes me worried about their loyalty to Latvia.

I read this as a hint that Harmony Centre is getting money from Russian government, through some secret channels. Vaira Vike-Freiberga did not endorse any of the candidates but she was much softer about Zatlers' supposed ethics lapses and characterized them as understandable.

Latvian presidential election: the stage is set!

Yesterday was the deadline for nominating candidates for the Latvian presidential election on May 31. And on the last day, we got another candidate!

Harmony Centre, a left-of-center party consisting mostly of ethnic-Russians, made a surprise move by nominating Aivars Endzins, the former Chairman of Constitutional Court of Latvia. On the evening of the same day, New Era Party's candidate Sandra Kalniete withdraw her candidacy in favour of Endzins, during the TV debate between the candidates. According to Kalniete, she made her decision during the debate, seeing that Endzins was the best candidate.

The cynic in me says that Kalniete's withdrawal was planned in advance and carried out in a way that would get the maximum positive publicity for Endzins. If so, New Era Party has proven that they are much better in staging events of this type than the coalition parties.

Who is Aivars Endzins? We know much more about him than Zatlers. Born in 1940, taught law at the University of Latvia for most of the Soviet period. Joined pro-independence Popular Front of Latvia in 1988. Unlike Kalniete, he was not among the top leaders of Popular Fronte, but he was quite active and was elected to the Latvian parliament in 1990 and re-elected in 1993 and 1995. In December 1996, he was appointed to lead the newly created Constitutional Court of Latvia. At this time, he resigned from both parliament and Latvian Way party to which he belonged at this point, so that he could become a politically neutral judge.

In last years, Endzins has spoken out against the top members of Latvian political elite on several occasions. Probably, the most prominent occasion was the Motte apartment case, in which a government real-estate management agency lead by Janis Motte handed out 183 government apartments in very good locations to members of political elite and their friends. The Constitutional Court reviewed the case and decided that the rules according to which the agency was run were illegal. According to Endzins, they were pressured not to consider the case by a number of politicians, including two prime ministers: Andris Skele and Vilis Kristopans.

On another occasion, Endzins spoke out against Imants Freibergs, the husband of our current president Vaira Vike-Freiberga. Freibergs family has acquired a long-term lease for land in a highly lucrative location in the resort town of Jurmala and wanted to build a house there. The problem was that the land was classified as a nature reserve and housing construction on it was prohibited! Imants Freibergs started working with Jurmala city council to remove his lot from the list of nature reserve so that he could build there. (They don't normally do that but if the lot belongs to a highly influential politician or businessman... the rules can change.) Endzins criticized that and suggested that Freibergs gives up the lease to the land.

So, if Endzins sees something wrong, he'll say that, even if the wrongdoers are high up in the government! His foreign policy abilities are unknown... but he has certainly communicated with foreign politicians and judges while being in the parliament (1990-1996) and Constitutional Court (1996-2006). So, he should be fine in that aspect. (If you think that's a a bit mellow endorsement of Endzins... yes, it is! I still wish Kalniete was a candidate.)

UPDATE: In comments, Pēteris Cedriņš corrects me and points out that Endzins has quite a bit of foreign policy experience:

he led the Latvian delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, was a member of the Latvian delegation to PACE, and has worked on the Venice Commission (the European Commission for Democracy through Law) and in the Baltic Assembly.

My previous posts on other presidential candidates:

• Zatlers: facts, my opinion.
• Candidates who have now withdrawn: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.