Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis said he would talk to his coalition partners about forming a majority government yesterday after a poll win that kept Latvia on the path of IMF-led austerity and eventual euro zone entry.
Dombrovskis and his coalition partners were set to secure 59 percent of the votes in Saturday’s election in the Baltic country, according to results from 882 of 1,013 polling stations. They currently rule as a minority government.
The vote was a triumph for Dombrovskis, who has already steered Latvia through harsh budget cuts and tax rises to meet the terms of a 7.5 billion euro (US$10.24 billion) bailout agreed with the IMF and the EU.
More austerity awaits the nation of 2.2 million people to reduce the budget deficit on the path to euro entry, which under the IMF and EU deal is targeted for 2014.
“Tomorrow [Sunday] we will meet the current coalition parties and start negotiations about forming a new government,” Dombrovskis told reporters late on Saturday night.
“The primary coalition model is the existing coalition,” he said, referring to his Unity bloc, the Union of Greens and Farmers and nationalists Everything for Latvia/For Fatherland and Freedom.
However, Dombrovskis said he would also meet the opposition Russian minority party Harmony Center, which had been hoping to win the election, but was heading for second place, to see if there was any way the government could cooperate with it.
“Voters have quite clearly voted for stability,” he said.
Despite the budget cuts, Latvians have regarded Dombrovskis as an honest crisis manager of the mess left by other governments. The economy has also begun to show a slow recovery from the 18 percent economic drop last year, the worst in the EU.
People have also accepted the budget measures, which have included public sector pay cuts of 50 percent, with forbearance.
The only public display of anger was a riot in Riga in January last year, before Dombrovskis took power.
The main challenge to Dombrovskis had come from Harmony Center, which has Latvia’s large Russian minority as its traditional base of support, but which had been hoping to woo ethnic Latvians to vote for it after the crisis.
It had hoped this would propel it to first place in the election and a possible place in government for the first time since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
The IMF and EU program aimed to reduce the budget deficit, avoiding a devaluation and paving the way for euro adoption in 2014. Domestic critics have said the plan puts too much emphasis on austerity and not enough on economic stimulation.
Nordic countries, whose banks such as Swedbank and SEB are heavily exposed to the Baltic region, also provided funds for the bailout.
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