Eastern approaches

LATVIA'S elections are attracting a lot of scrutiny for a small country. Recent events are one reason: the country suffered the worst economic crash in "eastern" Europe but then fought off doom-mongers and speculators who thought the crisis would turn into a collapse. The government of Valdis Dombrovkis has stabilised the economy with an IMF and EU- backed austerity programe (more axe than scalpel) which has cut public services and living standards in the hope of regaining competitiveness. Now it is the voters' turn to pass judgement, in elections on October 2nd.

Worries abound: will the new government stick to the agreement with the IMF or tear it up, provoking jitters all over Europe. Will the omnipresent oligarchs get their fingers back on the levers of power? Is Russian money or influence at work behind the scenes? Is the economic crisis denting Latvians' faith in the post-1991 political system?

But the immediate concern is the media, and in particular the squeeze on the independent bits of it by business and party-political influence. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is keeping a close eye on the elections via a "Needs Assessment Mission" (NAM) of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). The initial assessment on the media landscape says:

The media environment in Latvia was assessed...as providing the public with diverse information and a plurality of viewpoints. However, most OSCE/ODIHR NAM interlocutors expressed concerns with the lack of transparency in media ownership and with reported affiliations of some leading commercial broadcasters and newspapers with influential businessmen and politicians. While it was acknowledged that the reporting by those media outlets is not evidently biased, such affiliations are regarded as highly problematic from the perspective of neutrality and independence of media. In this context, most OSCE/ODIHR NAM interlocutors strongly favoured a comprehensive and independent media monitoring during the upcoming elections.

Latvia is no star when it comes to media freedom. In the 2010 rankings compiled by the American watchdog Freedom House, Latvia dropped almost at the bottom of the "Free" category, in joint 55th place with Ghana and Tuvalu (in the EU, only Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and Romania, in that order, did worse). Latvia's northern neighbour Estonia, by contrast, was in joint 19th place with Germany.

Reading the Latvian press, it is easy to see why. This year has seen the biggest Latvian daily Diena, once in the hands of a respectable Swedish media group, go through several bewildering shifts in ownership (and several editors) and suffer a drop in circulation of nearly a quarter. It is now in the hands of Viesturs Koziols, a wealthy local Latvian and close friends with Ainārs Šlesers, one of the two tycoons behind the Par labu Latviju [For a good Latvia] party, which is polling just under 6%. (All links are in Latvian and/or Russian only). The party has a friend in the Russian press too: the owner of the Russian-language daily Chas [Hour], Aleksejs Šeiņins, is running for parliament on the party's list. 

The centre-left, pro-Russian Saskaņas Centrs [Harmony Center], the likely election winner has media assets too. A year ago a leading Russian-language daily, Telegraf, was sold to Oļegs Stepanovs, the co-owner of Ventspils Nafta, a big local oil company and a sponsor of the party (he also appears close to the Latvian-language Latvijas avīze). The party  has close ties with another Russian daily “Vesti Segodnja” [News Today], which has published a ranting attack on wicked Swedish capitalists from the party's top candidate Janis Urbanovics, complaining that Swedish banks had forced Latvia into slavery.

Few Latvians would go that far, but many are upset by the way that the country has been run in recent years. That is one reason that Harmony Centre is likely to win 35 of 100 mandates in the next parliament. Its leader Nils Ušakovs is mayor of the capital Riga. His victory in that election, and  coalition with Mr Šlesers party, represented a breakthrough for the "pro-Russian" Harmony Centre, which showed it could attract votes from ethnic Latvians and form a coalition with a "Latvian" party. The big question in the election is whether the two allies can now pull off the same trick at a national level. Their control of the national press won't hurt.

The other big media-political force is the powerful and controversial mayor of Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs, who has close ties with a Latvian-language, Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze [Independent Morning Newspaper]. He is the prime ministerial candidate of the Greens and Farmers Union. A new scandal (link in English) has just broken over Mr Lembergs, one of Latvia's great political survivors. 

Other parties, such as the governing Vienotiba, [Unity], which scored  15% in a recent poll and is likely to gain 29 seats in parliament; and the nationalist Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK (3.9%) do not have in-house newspapers. It does not seem to have hurt them hugely. The Latvian media is still pluralistic. Dirt flies around in copious amounts and in all directions. Public television and radio, online media and news agencies still provide largely comprehensive and independent coverage. It will be interesting to see if the huge efforts made by some of Latvia's most powerful people to gain favourable coverage will pay off in votes, or just in ego-massages. But the worry is that bad habits of deference and cynicism are hard to shed. Outsiders and Latvians alike are hoping that the country's media woes will wane, not wax. 

PS This piece has been corrected to remove Latvijas avīze from the Lembergs camp and place it in the Stepanovs one. I have also made Mr Šeiņins owner rather than editor, as we mistakenly had him. Sorry for both errors.