Currently there are no reasons that could cause Evika Siliņa’s government to collapse, said one of two “independent Saeima deputies” Igors Rajevs in an interview to Diena.
It is worth mentioning that the votes of these two deputies have ensured the fragile 52-vote advantage in the parliament for Siliņa’s government.
Rajevs said usually coalitions collapse if there is some tough issue the coalition finds impossible to resolve, or if the coalition sees a different political composition could allow them to work more efficiently and demonstrate their work to voters to ensure votes in the future.
“And here I would like to say: right now I don’t see any reasons why this coalition could collapse, because both Progressives and the Union of Greens and Farmers can see that for them this is, if not the ideal, then the most successful card in this parliamentary term, and they have no interest in overthrowing this coalition in any way. They simply have no interest in doing this. New Unity is in a relatively comfortable position in this coalition – they have plenty of people in leading posts, which allows them to establish policies, and even if there are some changes within the coalition, it could weaken New Unity’s position in the new coalition, all the more so if we recall that the President of Latvia was also far from confident that he would also entrust the formation of the government to New Unity for the third time,” said Rajevs.
According to Rajevs, it is absolutely not in the coalition’s interests to cause some mess or undermine their own positions.
“Unfortunately, here we also end up with a certain paradoxical situation in the Saeima, because the parliament seemed very positive after elections – we beat Harmony, it’s out of the parliament. Aleksejs Rosļikovs’ influence in the Saeima is insignificant – he has nine votes, but he is not even close to the situation Harmony was in the previous Saeima. There are no open populists in the parliament (no matter how people perceive Latvia in First Place), as opposed to the previous Saeima. It started out with a coalition that consisted of New Unity, National Alliance and Combined List – Latvian thinking and state-focused government… Unfortunately, we can see that it failed the test of time. This is why I principally see no reasons that could force this coalition to collapse,” Rajevs continued. “Any political agreement is a compromise for both. And, I have to say, I guess the premier has been able to hold this team together and eventually come to compromises on some sort of crucial issue,” he said.
The politician admitted that, when it comes to stability of the coalition, the vote for the budget will be this coalition’s test of stability. Nevertheless, he sees no reasons to doubt that this budget will be approved.