LEFT-WING IDEAS IN CONTEMPORARY LATVIA

In: Culture crossroads: journal of the Research Centre at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Band 8, S. 45-52

Abstract

The word left has different meanings in Latvian. Alongside with one side of your body it also means social democratic and socialist-communist political orientation. In its turn kreisā prece (the left goods) means something illegal, and an inadequate idea is sometimes also called kreisa ideja (a left idea). In Latvia the 1990s came with the rightist thinking and its notions: market economy, liberal democracy, open society, and competition. Since then the rightist ideas have dominated Latvian political ideology. Even the 2008 economic crisis was the success story in the opinion of the right-wing politicians because the crisis helped to cut the unnecessary, non-characteristic and non-economical positions of government spending. At the same time the policies implemented by the state of Latvia were rather left-wing in many sectors if we look at the level of state intervention in the distribution of funding. Latvia provides state maintained free healthcare, tuition-free system of education, and the availability of culture to society is state subsidised. It allows me to draw a speculative hypothesis that the rightist and leftist ideas are in a mutually complementary dialectic struggle in Latvia. The leftist ideas are not implemented, and there is no need to fully put them into practice. The best possible world is the one in which there is rightist market capitalism and liberal democracy which undergo constant criticism by the leftist ideas, however, never to the extent that the leftist ideas should be put into effect.