52,Latvia, former foreign minister, commissioner
without portfolio
"She is, quite simply, a smashing
PR coup," says a Latvian diplomat based in Brussels.
"Everyone in Brussels will be charmed by her. Latvia
has a pearl."
Commissioners are not supposed to be non partisan in
connection with their
countries, but inevitably they come to be so - perhaps
more truly when that country is small and a new member
state, so whose governments are relatively unfamiliar
and fail to lodge themselves in the collective
Brussels memory. One wonders whether Latvia in
Brussels could become embodied in the
person of Kalniete.
Any of the three Baltic countries could have done with
someone like her. Politics in all countries is and has
been unstable. Whatever successes Lithuania and
particularly Estonia have ratcheted up in economically
in the last decade, their governments, like Latvia's,
have tended to be short-lived. The various
economically
clever moves by a succession of youth dominated,
financially literate Estonian cabinets, who have made
Estonia the most open economy in the world, and most
successful of those, has not translated into political
endurance. Estonia has had 11
governments in 11 years, more than Italy, a fact
attributed like in the other Baltic states to
inexperienced politicians and undeveloped party
systems. This chaos for some reason seems to have
reached a peak just now, for some reason, just over
two months short of enlargement. Lithuania's president
Rolandas Paksas is undergoing an impeachment process
over allegations that his aides were engaged in
influence peddling and organised crime.
Latvia itself has just been hit by a government crisis
as the burly, rather authoritarian populist prime
minister Einars resigned after his coalition parties
left him. Estonia has been more stable recently -
although its prime minister Juhan Parts doesn't really
cut much of a charismatic figure on the European
podium. But at any rate, as insurance if nothing else,
having a charismatic figure in Brussels over the
crucial bridging period of enlargement
is an advantage. Even if the commissioner's tenure at
6 months were temporary that would be a long time in
Baltic politics.
Had Lithuania and Estonia had good commissioner
designates it might have compensated for their
political weaknesses. But finance minister Dalia
Grybauskaite of Lithuania, though able, and very
clever, and looking to shadow Pedro Solbes or Michaele
Schreyer in the finance or budgetary departments,
could disappear into Brussels, and fail to be a symbol
for Lithuania. Siim Kallas of Estonia is highly
controversial. He is one of the most qualified of all
the 10 commissioner designates, having been finance
and prime minister, and governor of the central bank.
But it is not so much his past as a communist - while
working in Estonian journalism in the 70s and 80s -
that is problem despite the fact that it excites the
newspapers and makes the European People's Party pass
theatrical but phony resolutions about banning
communists from office. Rather it is a certain odour
that attaches to Kallas, made concrete by allegations
of him having squirrelled away 10 million dollars
illegally when central bank governor in 1992. The
details are a little vague, but:
"Ten million dollars went missing from the central
bank," says one Estonian commentator. "No one knows
what happened to it." The Estonians actually talk
openly about this: as the strongest political figure
in Estonia, he is, in the words of one Estonian
commentator in Brussels: "The man everyone knows made
ten million dollars vanish and who is the man who
always gets his way. Like getting this job of
commissioner."
Kallas was cleared in Estonian court back in 1993. But
the way intelligent Estonians talk about him reflects
an unease about their own post independence politics -
an unease shared to a growing extent about east
Europe's nascent democratic politics as whole by
those in the know in the commission. An unease of
which Kallas, even a cleared of crime, is a symbol:
the unstable post 1992 politics. The bickering, the
one-man parties, the public's suspicion of shady
financial deals. Despite the reformers' success at
bringing Estonia and Lithuania to relative prosperity
and EU membership, one Latvian official said that
there was a lot of bitterness about how the drastic
free market reformers - however much their reforms
were eventually to benefit the young - destroyed
people's rouble savings overnight when converted to
the new currencies at a disadvantageous rate. This
harmed pensioners, and the move came to stand as a
symbol for all the costs that had to be paid with
reform, and the fact that there were a lot of losers
too. There is a feeling that a lot of these
technocrats benefited from exchange rate deals.
Rumours had it that some political figures shipped all
the roubles they had accumulated back to Russia and
spent them there, on cheap raw materials which they
then exported at hard currency prices - just like
Russia's notorious oligarchs, albeit on a smaller
scale.
While this has never been proved, and while arguably a
stronger figure than his Lithuanian counterpart, as
Estonia's most talented politician, Kallas could
certainly compensate for the anonymity of the always
youthful cabinet back home as representing Estonia in
Brussels. But it might not be a representation
Estonians are proud of, or even feel reflect their
image, projected with assiduousness, of Eastern
Europe's golden boys. There is too much about Kallas
that intimates either the compromises that had to be
made in the name of post independence development, or
an aura of sleaze of a country with neophyte political
traditions and a small talent pool of politicians.
Whatever good he did for Estonia, he is seen as a man
of the past. "We would like to shake his hand and see
him go. He has done his work, made our mistakes for
us, helped us, harmed us" said one Estonian
journalist.
But Kalniete is different. It is not so much
the fact that she is a woman that sets her apart -
Latvia incidentally, has the world's best statistics
on women employed in the labour force, women employed
as professionals, and where gender income differences
are lowest. (It is also the country with the highest
ratio of women to men!.) Rather, for one, she is
untouched by domestic politics, having spent the
crucially incriminating years of the 1990s abroad:
first as the ambassador to the United Nations in
Geneva, then as ambassador to France - she is
francophile and francophone - before becoming foreign
minister in 2002. "She is untainted," said one
official. "She is above politics." She is also
separate, as an artist, from technocratic tradition:
chairwoman of the Latvian artist's union
and the author of several books an award-winning book
published in French about her parents' deportation to
Siberia and their return to Latvia, a experience
shared by tens of thousands of countrymen who were
victims of Stalins's attempts to wipe out the Latvian
nation by removing all Latvians of ability,
repopulating the country with Russians, and
extirpating all traces of Latvian culture.
The moral of her book echoes the theme of anti
totalitarianism of many of her speeches, which gives,
some say, her almost an authority of a female Havel.
"I never underestimate the evil of totalitarianism,
because in closed systems you never know what is going
on inside the country. It is much worse than you
think," she said in an interview on why she supported
the war in Iraq. "I had to really work hard to extract
the stories from my parents."
The book's last lines are: "The old lady wakes up
often and "she contemplates at length the emptiness of
the night, the time to calm herself and to understand
that she is at home. Latvia."
The French awarded her the Legion of Honour. Those who
know her says the 51 year old divorced brunette is
sensitive but made of tensile steel, with a dry sense
of humour. When the Eurovision song contest came to
Latvia last year she said dryly - not willing to show
people whether she was tongue in cheek: "I prefer the
EU".
She could be good for Europe and, compared her fellow
baltic commissioners, a good
representative for the Baltics, the least likely
figure to be just an "intern with Mercedes", as unkind
wags have called this interim team of commissioners
without portfolio. Above all, she could be a god
figure for Latvia, the languishing orphan of the
Baltics, bringing the country finally back into view.
Writing a comment on her Siberian book she notes:
"This sad exploration of the past restores life to
this little country “erased from the map and minds”.
The path that led it into nothingness belongs to our
memory from now on." ¨Latvia will soon be be emerging
finally out of its nothingness, not least with her
help, to a higher profile, as if restoring life to a
country is a task she has extended from the writer's
role to that of a
politician.
