Latvians urged to help stop 'oligarchs'

PRIME MINISTER Valdis Dombrovskis has urged Latvians to reject parties linked with controversial “oligarchs” in a snap election today that he calls a crucial chance to purge the Baltic state’s murky political world.

The early vote was triggered by former president Valdis Zatlers who, in his last major move as head of state, dissolved parliament in May over its refusal to allow prosecutors to investigate an allegedly corrupt politician.

Angered by his tough stance, a majority of MPs voted to replace him as president with a former banker. In a July referendum, however, Latvians tired of political scandal voted overwhelmingly in support of Mr Zatlers’s decision to disband the chamber and hold a snap election.

Mr Dombrovskis’s liberal Unity bloc and a new party led by Mr Zatlers are expected to join forces to form the core of a new government, but polls suggest they could be challenged by the mostly ethnic-Russian Harmony Centre party.

Harmony Centre is widely predicted to win the election with about 20 per cent of votes, followed by Unity with about 14 per cent and Mr Zatlers’s party with some 11 per cent – enough to keep Harmony Centre out of power if the two ideologically similar groups forge an alliance.

Mr Dombrovskis is given considerable praise internationally for pushing through dramatic cutbacks that slashed Latvia’s budget deficit, dragged it out of the European Union’s deepest recession and set it on course for 4 per cent growth this year.

But while he prescribes a little more austerity to further trim the budget deficit and get Latvia on track to join the euro in 2014, Harmony Centre says it is time to loosen the reins and boost social spending. This message resonates beyond Latvia’s large Russian-speaking community, among a population of about two million people who have suffered wage cuts and where unemployment is still about 16 per cent.