Hasty election shows Latvian papers’ true colours

Valdis Zatlers came out of nowhere. Latvia’s president-elect was proposed by the government as a compromise candidate late on 22 May. The public had never heard of him; Zatlers was just a doctor in a busy Riga hospital.

When announcing his candidacy, the centre-right coalition also decided to move the vote forward from 7 June to 31 May. Ostensibly the reason was to give the parliament, which in Latvia elects the head of state (a candidate needs 51 votes out of 100 to win), additional time in case the closed ballot failed.

But critics charged that the government simply wanted to cut the amount of time the fourth estate would have to dig up the dirt on Zatlers, a trauma surgeon with no political background.

Reporters had eight days to probe the past of the man who could replace Vaira Vike-Freiberga and become the Baltic state’s third president since independence in 1991.

Pinpointing Zatlers’s Achilles heel proved easy: unrecorded payments for his medical services. The practice - slipping doctors an envelope with cash as a token of appreciation - is universal in the former Soviet Union; most doctors could not survive without it. To his credit, candidate Zatlers immediately admitted that he had accepted cash gratuities (though only after an operation, never before) and never paid taxes on the income.

Latvia’s papers reacted differently. Pro-government publications said the esteemed doctor was a victim of a Soviet system and should be given a chance to come clean - pay the back taxes, a small fine and bury the issue. Others, such as Diena, Latvia’s second largest paper (average daily circulation - 42,000), castigated the government for supporting someone who willingly broke the law. Sarmite Elerte, editor-in-chief, says that Zatlers’s candidacy is a visible sign that democracy and respect for rule of law are still immature in Latvia.

Diena, which is owned by Sweden’s Bonnier Group, also publishes 5 Min, a free daily available in two languages, Latvian and Russian, making it the largest publisher. A liberal paper targeting urban, educated readers, Diena has been the lone voice of tolerance for advocating rights of minorities. Nearly all other publications decried the recent gay parade in downtown Riga, including the leading daily, Latvijas Avize (50,000).

During the election, Latvijas Avize supported the only other candidate, Aivars Endzins, former chief of the constitutional court. After Zatlers’s victory (he mustered 58 votes), the paper toned down its criticism of the doctor. As deputy editor Ivars Busmanis explains, the paper believes Zatlers, who will take his oath of office on 8 July, should be given a chance to prove himself.

This is the current sentiment in Latvia’s print media, which boasts 111 publications, including 22 dailies and 89 non-dailies, and an average daily circulation of 496,000. Across the language divide, 75 titles are in Latvian, 35 in Russian, and one weekly - the Baltic Times (9,000) - in English.

Dzintris Kolats, executive director of the Latvian Press Publishers Association, says that the print media market is characterised by a large number of owners, particularly outside Riga. Competition in Daugavpils, Latvia’s second largest city, where ethnic Russians predominate, is fierce. Kolats adds that foreign ownership is minimal, though investors are now shopping around given the market’s strong growth in advertising revenue.

Generally, Latvia’s papers see the world from across a linguistic divide. If the Latvian-language media supported Estonia’s recent decision to remove a Soviet war memorial, then the Russian press impugned it. The two leading Russian dailies - Vesti Segodnya (39,000) and Chas (20,000) - even sent a team of reporters in the same vehicle to cover the event. Estonia’s border officials refused them entrance to the country.

Vesti Segodnya and Chas do not hide their pro-Russia, anti-NATO stance, since this is what their readership identifies with. When Latvian-language papers devoted front-page coverage to the recent unveiling of a memorial to victims of communism in Washington, Vesti Segodnya ran a large picture of a statue commemorating victims of a Nazi concentration camp outside Riga.

But occasionally Russian-language papers outperform their rivals. In 2003 Chas literally changed the history books when it discovered that eight Latvian merchant ships participated in the Second World War on the allied side. Previously the official version was that no Latvians fought voluntarily on the Western front. Six of the ships, manned by 163 sailors supplying coal and rubber to the allies, were eventually sunk by German submarines.

Regarding Zatlers, Russian-language publications have warmed to the president-elect. Unlike Vike-Freiberga, who has served as president since 1999, the doctor speaks Russian. Zatlers even used it during his post-victory press conference, which surprised many Latvians. Ethnic Russians, who comprise approximately one-third of the country’s 2.3 million, still bristle at Vike-Freiberga’s promise to learn Russian. She never did.

• Gary Peach is a freelance journalist based in Riga, Latvia.

Valdis Zatlers came out of nowhere. Latvia’s president-elect was proposed by the government as a compromise candidate late on 22 May. The public had never heard of him; Zatlers was just a doctor in a busy Riga hospital.