This month The Central Election Commission of Latvia published the list of the MEP candidates in Latvia. It’s much longer than I thought, therefore I won’t describe all of our candidates, but just give you a brief information about them in general.
Together there are 17 parties who have handed in their list of candidates, starting with 1 and ending with 18 candidates in each list. Pretty big diversity! Some of the parties I hear from the first time (such as “Libertas.lv“, which unites candidates from 3 other different parties), but some already have representatives in the current EP (e.g., “New Era“).
The official statistics show that together there are 186 candidates - quite a lot for such a small country as Latvia where we have only 2,3 millions of inhabitants (and not all of them are eligable to vote) and only 8 MEPs will be elected in the upcoming elections. As it was foreseen, most of the candidates are men (64,5%), but the women are almost twice less. Why foreseen? Because indeed in the politcal field there are much, much more men active than women - I don’t remember actual number, but I once counted that in our national parliament the proportion in percentage are approximately the same.
Even more interesting in the age - most of the candidates are 31-40 (25,9%) or 51-60 (22%) old, the youngest beeing 22 years old and the oldest - 85 years old. This comes as a surprise, because the current Latvian MEPs all are over 40 years and in general we have only a few active younger politicians (although in the recent years we have seen also younger ministers). So I am asking myself, if we have so many young people candidating - why aren’t they getting active and visible before in the political field back home, but going stright to the European Parliament? I’ll leave my comments and thoughts better to myself for a while…
The fact that most of the candidates have the higher education and only 27 haven’t got the university degree comes with no surprise - it should be like that. More than half of all candidates are living in Riga, the capital of Latvia, but I am happy to see also other towns and cities represented.
If you are wondering how many of the current MEPs are re-candidating, than the answer is 7, including also a current Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa. This means that 3 of the current MEPs are not re-candidating, but I am more curious about G. Chiesa. In the last months there have been quite a lot of media coverage about his work - always together with the Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka (who has bad relationship with the rest of Latvian MEPs) and he has even mentioned that he is currently living in Riga, although he doesn’t speak any Latvian. What is his motivation to candidate from Latvia, not Italy? This I would like to investigate more, but maybe some blogger from Italy could give us more update and information from the Italian point of view.
More information about our candidates and interesting facts will follow, but meanwhile those who understand Latvian language can get the information about all the candidates, the parties and their programmes here.
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