For those who watch these things, it looks as if Latvia’s voters have chosen to stick with the current team. Over at the Economist’s Eastern Approaches blog, Edward Lucas reports:
The prime minister’s Vienotība (Unity) party scored 30.7% (33 mandates out of 100). That is the second biggest victory by any party since the restoration of independence. Overall, the parties forming today’s minority coalition of 47 mandates gained 57.6% of the vote. Mr Dombrovskis said this meant, most probably, that the government should “continue its work”.
And this is interesting:
The “pro-Russian” Saskaņas Centrs (Harmony Centre), which was expected to win the elections and was already prepared to form a coalition, came second, gaining 25.71%. They are likely to get 29 mandates and form the most stable opposition ever. Negotiations on a model of co-operation with Harmony Centre have already started.
As Lucas has made clear, and given the complexities of Latvian society, “Pro-Russian” is somewhat too simplistic a label for Harmony Centre, however, there are occasions when you can have too much, uh, nuance, such as in this passage from a report on the elections from yesterday’s New York Times:
Despite Soviet and many modern Russian claims to the contrary, [1944-91] is a period that the local populations consider an occupation. Thousands were deported to labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere, replaced mostly with Russian speakers from other parts of the Soviet Union.
To say “local populations consider [Soviet rule] an occupation” is a curious way (it seems to suggest that there might be some reasonable debate about the matter) of phrasing it. As what ought to be an unnecessary reminder, the Soviets annexed Latvia in 1940, lost it to the invading Germans in 1941, and then reoccupied the country in 1944 — and stayed until 1991.
As for the “thousands” deported, let’s put some numbers on that. Deportations began after the 1940 coup, culminating in a mass deportation in mid-June 1941 of some 15,000 people. Few ever made it home again. When the Soviets returned, the deportations resumed, most notoriously on three days in March 1949, when forty thousand men, women and children (roughly 2 percent of the much larger pre-war population) were deported. All this, of course, is before beginning to tally the executions.
But then I read this, and the curious tone of the New York Times report makes more sense:
When they gained independence, the new Baltic governments enacted policies that alienated and oppressed the Russian-speaking population…
Oh come on.