Talk Elections

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45774578 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45774578)


I believe Latvia's exit from the EU and NATO is imminent, and Putin will invade if it doesn't happen.

What do you think?

No.

Harmony has been a largest party in Latvian parliament for a long time (it has, actually, lost both the vote share and a seat this time), and it will neither enter the government after this election, nor will it advocate withdrawal from EU or NATO. And, of course, the only way Putin would invade Latvia is if it were to withdraw.

Next time you want to write a completely clueless post, would you mind choisng something nobody here knows anything about - something about bivalve moluscs should work.

Why are you such a @@/$ about it. He is trying to get insight and inform us of these events. You could have stated the reality instead of offending him.

He is a nincompoop and has been one for a very long time, hence his facially absurd prognostications. A more observant individual would have caught on to this instead of making impotent paeans to "avoiding offense".

That said, Latvian political parties do seem to have strange names. "Development/For!"? For what? "Who Owns the Country?" An organization with a question for a name is pretty novel.

look at the Latvia thread in IE: this changes nothing.

Both this BBC article and this take show a staggering lack of knowledge of Baltic politics; and demonstrates why lots of takes on the region can be incredibly, incredibly wrong.  Quite how the BBC allowed just a bad piece to be published on their website is rather worrying and suggests that recent UK government policy might well be having the desired affect on the quality of BBC reporting.

Correct; Harmony got the most seats and votes in the election.  However they only got 19.9% of the vote (DOWN 3.2% on last time) and look like they are on the course of getting 23 seats out of 100 which is DOWN 1 on the last election and not exactly close to the point where the Latvian parties would have to talk to them.  Its also correct that KPV finished second and also probably true that they are probably funded by some folk in the East - that's generally the situation when a new group emerges with lots of money out of nowhere.  However to suggest that this is somehow a new development or unique to today isn't the case - in the 2014 election you had NSL which was basically what KPV are now: a vaguely populist party with a stupid name backed by lots of black money that probably came from Russia who did very well in one election and then fell apart and became irrelevant an election later.  I also don't think that you can really describe the NKP as "populists" - at least not compared to the other parties in the region.

The generally trend on Latvian elections as quickly explained: the main divide in Latvia (on more than just elections, but it cuts through them as well) is the divide between the Latvian population in Latvia and the Latvian-Russian population.  The latter are broadly a new population who moved to Latvia during the Soviet occupation; the older groups generally don't know Latvian as the schools didn't require it and there was a large increase in the number of Russians in Latvia during this period: going from below 10% before 1940 to 34% in 1990 (which increases to above 40% if you include Belarussians and Ukranians, most of whom speak Russian as either their first language or as their main second language).  This meant that after Independence populist nationalist appeals to "cultural survival" and similar things really worked since in some ways those parties had a bit of a point (an example being the Latvian majority being required to learn Russian as a second language at school while the Russian minority weren't required to learn Latvian).

This divide has always been the strongest divide in Latvian politics and the general trend in Latvian elections is what is actually going to happen here; Harmony generally tops the poll but never does well enough to force Latvian parties to include them in any governments; and the Latvian parties put together large catch-all coalitions to exclude Harmony from government.  KPV also won't be included for a variety of reasons - that worry about where their backing comes from is the major one.  The talk is primarily of a JKP-Par!-NA-ZZS coalition with the possible inclusion of Jaunā Vienotība (they don't need to be in the thing for the parliamentary arithmetic to work but broadly they would align with the aims of the government anyway); the main question being finding a person to act as a PM candidate who'd satisfy everyone in that coalition.  So again this isn't any different from Latvian elections historically - "populism" or nationalism isn't new to Latvia and has always been the general trend in the country.

What I think that we are seeing here is people taking trendy political narratives - in this case the rise of nationalism and populism plus Russian involvement in the elections of other countries - and assuming that is the case in every country in the world.  You're also seeing an assumption that all "populist" parties are the same which they aren't and its way its an incredibly useless description for political parties.  To equate Harmony - who are in practice a Russian minority rights party (with historically dodgy links to United Russia) who like using nice sounding Social Democratic rhetoric - with the JKP - who're basically the latest incarnation of a right wing Conservative Latvian party with incredibly pro-Latvian policies on the cultural questions - and to assume that they ever would govern with each other unless it was impossible not to is frankly ridiculous.

Also Putin is never going to invade a NATO member: he's not stupid and knows that doing that would lead to him not being in power much longer.  Add in the fact that the Latvian-Russian population is generally more favourable of being in Latvia than Russia despite the discriminatory policies of the Latvian government and that the EU is a fairly strong part of that; you don't have the support for Russian intervention which you seemed to have in Crimea and may well have in Eastern Ukraine.  Not all Russian minorities are evil third columns trying to subvert other places for the glory of Mother Russia and to think so is rather xenophobic and McCarthyist.

I think you should stop panicking and better inform yourself about how things work.

I don't know anything about Latvia's internal politics (well, I do a little now...but I'm sure I'll forget), but you don't have to know anything about Latvia's internal politics to know that the idea Putin would invade if a country didn't leave NATO is just silly on it's face.

Putin would probably reward Latvia in some way if they did leave NATO/the EU.

Besides, by this point he probably thinks (thanks to Trump) that the EU won't defend a country like Latvia.

I think its all very interesting; but I was interested enough in the region to write my university dissertation on Ethnopolitics in the Baltic States so perhaps I'm very unusual!


This sounds incredibly hysterical and also again demonstrates a lack of knowledge about Latvian politics.  The Latvian parties outside of KPV broadly see the EU+NATO as either being outright good things or in the case of the National Alliance their Euroscepticism is secondary to their anti-russianness.  Harmony argue in favour of "closer relations" with Russia but quite what they means they don't say and they aren't anti-EU or NATO on paper: KPV don't have policies on anything so who really knows.  There isn't the think between the nationalist right and support for Russia in Latvia as there has tended to be elsewhere: and that's because again of the importance of the ethnicity cleavage in the country.  In the Baltics - and in much of Central and Eastern Europe - the NATO and to a lesser extent the EU aren't just political or economic alliances: they are highly symbolic demonstrations of the values of those countries and where they stand in the world post-1989.  A political shift in Latvia towards an affiliation with the West to one with Russia would require either a dramatic shift in the views of both the Latvian elites and the overall population of Latvia or some kind of major political shift in the policies of either the EU or NATO which isn't going to happen.  Indeed it would also require a major shift in the views of the Russian minority - who broadly aren't supportive of Russia, especially in the case of young Latvian-Russians who've only ever grown up in Latvia and see it as their home and have an identity which includes being both Russian and Latvian.

Indeed; its almost as hysterical as the right wing Latvian parties tend to sound!  They also shout about Russians in the bed and try to find Russian conspiracies everywhere they can, and usually they aren't founded.  I'd personally suggest doing your own research into the situation in the Baltics: its very complicated and different to other countries in the world.

Thanks for correcting me, you're being far more generous than many others on this forum....

Short of nuking Moscow, St. Petersburg and Voronezh there is nothing Putin can do for mainstream Latvian politicians to consider that a worthwhile reward.

This all reminds me an old Soviet joke. April 12th, 1961, a Latvian guy is standing next to his farmstead, a postman is passing by with the news: "Valdis, have you heard, Russians went into space!" To which Valdis responds (with a hopefull intonation in his voice): "All of them?!"

Well, yeah, I am a dickhead and do not feel it is a problem. Do you?

I've heard it too, except instead of Latvian guys you had Polish guys. I suppouse this joke has been present in all Eastern Bloc.

In Soviet Russia, space goes into you.

I am pretty sure most neighbours would be willing to let Russians colonise Mars: as long as it can be made certain there is no way any of them come back.