Austerity-weary voters in Lithuania looked set yesterday to evict the Baltic state’s four-year-old Conservative government in a general election and hand power to the left.
Opinion polls showed Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius’ Conservative party and its Liberal allies facing punishment by the electorate despite a recovery from one of the world’s deepest recessions.
Voters in the EU nation are expected to swing behind the center-left Social Democrats led by Algirdas Butkevicius, and the left-wing populist Labor party of controversial Russian-born ex-minister and businessman Viktor Uspaskich.
Butkevicius, a former finance minister, is tipped to become prime minister in a coalition with Labor.
The left pledges to raise the minimum wage and introduce a progressive income tax, but Butkevicius has also underlined his prudent credentials.
He quit as finance minister in 2005 in part because the then Social Democrat-led government did not close the gap between spending and revenue.
Defeat by the Social Democrats would be a bitter blow for Kubilius, who beat them in the last election in 2008 and is the only Lithuanian prime minister to survive a full term.
In 2008, voters heeded his message that the Social Democrats failed to rein in breakneck growth fueled by credit and wage hikes and left Lithuania ill-prepared for the global crisis.
Kubilius was also prime minister from 1999 to 2000, when Lithuania was lashed by the economic meltdown in neighboring Russia. However, the 2009 crisis was far deeper, with Lithuania’s economy shrinking by 14.8 percent.
The Kubilius government launched spending cuts well beyond those of Western members of the EU, which Lithuania joined in 2004.
“This prime minister now is linked to the cuts in wages and pensions, which many people felt personally,” analyst Ramunas Vilpisauskas said, adding that Kubilius had been frank and never sought popularity.
Despite facing defeat, Kubilius is unbowed.
“If you want to come back to recovery, first of all you need to implement fiscal austerity measures, you need to bring back order into your financial system,” he said “And we have the results.”
The recovery began in 2010, with output expanding by 1.4 percent, before increasing to 6 percent last year, but analysts say too few voters feel the benefits. The government’s growth forecast is a slower 2.5 percent this year and 3 percent next year.
Gloom has stoked emigration to western Europe, which still seems an option despite its economic woes. Last month’s data showed Lithuania’s population was 2.98 million, its lowest in decades. In 2001, it was almost 3.5 million.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the