Significant local news story in Latvia

The Latvian government

As presented in the article on the country's geopolitics, the election of the Latvian government is a major news story this year.

Indeed, while the Latvian parliamentary elections took place on 6 October, the government was not officially introduced until 23 January 2019, four months later. This long period of uncertainty illustrates the country's political instability.

One of the government's priorities is to clean up the banking sector. Because in 2018, Latvia was shocked by a new history. The governor of the Central Bank is suspected of having accepted bribes, he is still awaiting his trial.

And ABVL Bank has been accused of money laundering by the American Treasury. It had also been revealed by the Latvian investigative press that the same bank had siphoned more than one billion euros from Moldovan banks.

This is a recurrent problem in Latvia.

Demonstration against education reforms

A new manifestation was organised in Riga. A march from the Latvian Riflemen Monument in the centre of the city's old town to the seat of government numbered over four thousand. Where could you hear "hands off Russian schools!".

In April, Latvian President Raimonds Vējonis signed new amendments to the Education Act and the General Education Act, in which schools for ethnic minorities will gradually start moving towards secondary education in Latvian only.

The reform itself was first announced in autumn 2017 by Kārlis Šadurskis, the Minister of Education and Science, and immediately provoked an uproar among the Russian-speaking minorities.

Aleksandrs Bartaševičs, the mayor of Rezekne - a city with a very high percentage of Russian speakers - described this reform as a "crusade against Russian schools".

The objective of this reform is to make graduates more competitive on the labour market. Access to higher education and higher wages in the workplace is generally easier if a graduate speaks Latvian.

15/05/2019