After the Latvian July 23 referendum...

The formative referendum dismissed the 10th Saeima, and the first ever emergency elections in Latvia will be held in September 17, 2011.

The time to prepare for elections is short and thus most political parties go with their old or slightly upgraded programs. Because among the Latvian populace most of the democratic institutions are dismissingly unpopular, and parliament being among them, thus many new faces have appeared on the party lists. And to make the situation even more intriguing also there is a new kid on the block, who shall try to squeeze into the Latvian party political spectrum.

Until now it is hard to predict the exact outcome of the Latvian elections, because the Latvian party political system has returned to the square one, and since the budgetary funding for the political parties will start only from 01.01.2012, we could finally start to project operations and what kind of system will be formed out from the ethnically divided and scarsely populated Latvian parties.

Because of the emergency character of those formative elections I have decided to run for the Saeima myself. This would make me to change my usual schedule and I have already started to participate in the month long election campaign sprint.




Other than that, my hunch is that the center right Unity, the center left Harmony Center (HC), the liberal Zatlers Reform (ZRP) party, the Union of Greens and Farmers as well as the conservative National Union party would get elected into the parliament. I am not sure about chances of the For Human Rights in United Latvia party as well as about the desperate maverick trying to do anything to get elected. Nevertheless, the fact is that until now about a third of electors are undecided and thus the campaign month (or better say the sprint!) will determine whether Latvian voters shall opt for the European of post-Soviet path of development. The European path would be defined by voters trusting the results of hard won reforms of the Valdis Dombrovskis government and allowing to form coalition with either the ZRP or the HC party. The opposite and hopefully non materializing path would foresee the populist politicans engineering an ethnically deterministic vote for the benefit of ''populous anarchy a'la lettica'', and thus opening Ms Latvia for uncharted waters...again:)

P.S. My latest piece in Ukrainian ''Tyzhden'' (in Ukrainian)