The Central Election Commission (CVK) is not the right institution to lie about in order to look better in the eyes of your voters. This time, Andris Vurčs and Andrejs Lukaševics, MPs from the “Sovereign Power/Jaunlatvieši” Olaine, may have to make sure of this.
In the first case, the police will have to find out whether Vurčs really has a secondary education, in the second case, they will evaluate the contradictions in Lukaševics’s relatively recent statements about his education. Why do MP candidates tend to “jump on the bandwagon” on issues where someone else has already been burned, BNN asks Filips Rajevskis, co-owner of the company “Mediju tilts”, a political scientist.
“It’s a matter of reputation,” says Filips Rajevskis when asked why the MP candidates may have lied about their education, “The belief that representatives of the people must have an education has long been ingrained in Latvia. Sometimes it has been reduced to the idea that “paper” is definitely needed, and many study not for the sake of education itself, but for the sake of “paper”. Regardless of whether a candidate for deputy is truly educated or if he only has the necessary “paper”, from a reputational point of view it is an important thing for Latvian society. That is why those people also lie because they want to look better and smarter than you are,” explains the political scientist.
When asked why the aforementioned candidates do not learn anything from the example of their party member Glorija Grevcova, who lost her mandate as a deputy of the 14th Saeima for lying and was punished with 160 hours of community service, Filips Rajevskis says that
people very often do not learn from other people’s mistakes and they have to learn from their own.
“Perhaps Grevcova is in that information bubble where everyone has already forgotten what happened to her. If people learned from other people’s mistakes, then life in this world would be easier. But they are trying to make their own, and that is already the moment of the lack of education.”
A couple of years ago, a collective initiative was submitted to the Saeima to make it mandatory for deputies to obtain higher education. To BNN’s remark that the initiative was rejected, but perhaps it should have been implemented anyway, Filips Rajevskis replies that it would not help and, if such a norm were introduced, then some fraud would inevitably begin to circumvent it. “It is no secret that diplomas in the world can also be purchased for money, and who will then make sure whether that diploma is earned or bought. Therefore, it would be a utopian and also unnecessary norm.”
The political scientist points out that the best way for a voter to make sure whether a candidate for deputy has something on his mind or is just being a jerk is through mutual communication with him. However, it is also possible that the candidate is similar to his voter and both have empty minds. “This is a democratic process where the voter is looking for a representation that suits him. And in such a situation, to interfere with some kind of norms… I don’t think it’s right.”
Read also: A departmental investigation into the education of Olaine municipality member Vurčs begins