All About Latvia

Victims or voters?

Sep 17

AleksSociety 2 Comments

Nothing Special became the theme of the anti-crisis protests in 2008 and 2009.

RIGA – Speaking to LNT TV Thursday morning (some links are in Latvian), Ainars Šlesers said the government signed a secret agreement with the lenders regarding the sale of state-owned enterprises to pay the international loan in full in 2012.

“[Paying off the loan] is only possible with the sale of state-owned companies,” Šlesers said. The secret agreement metaphor is the obvious reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a 1939 deal that divided Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Not so long ago, Šlesers called the €7.5 billion agreement with the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission, “a financial occupation,” in a reference to 50 years of the Soviet occupation, which followed the signing of the pact.

Many people believe that the government is killing off its people on purpose by implementing the terms of the agreement with the lenders, who pay for Latvia’s budget deficit. Many people draw an equal sign between Latvians boarding Ryanair for Dublin and Stalin forcing men and women in the middle of the night to leave for Siberia. The Latvian Pensioners Association at its recent meeting distributed fliers with names of members of parliament who voted last June to cut pensions (the measure was ruled unconstitutional). The leaflet’s title is “They voted for genocide.”

The presentday political narrative is being written with familiar undertones of national victimhood of the past. For if Latvians aren’t the victims of things they cannot control, they ought to take the responsibility for what is happening in their country. In this context, it is not surprising then that 65 percent of Latvian voters believe that the upcoming elections could be fraudulent.