“Looking for enemies where there are none”: the former president believes the citizenship issue should have been resolved differently 0 8

We have pushed too many away

Let’s move on to the discussion about the nineties. What, perhaps, should have been done differently, what remains undone? Andris Berzinsh believes that we really should learn lessons from those years because we are at a crossroads again. “The structure of the Supreme Council at that time seemed more understandable to me, as did all our actions within its framework. I was fortunate that alongside my mandate as a deputy, I was the head of the executive committee of Valmiera, so I could directly see how the decisions of the Supreme Council affected life on the ground. This provided a solid connection to reality, especially on economic issues.”

From today’s perspective, he feels that the government does one thing, business does another, and people in the middle are “neither here nor there.” “Such organized chaos, but this is already today’s question — what needs to be done. If we go back to the nineties, there is one thing we did not finish.

It was a time of rising when people wanted to build something new, and we unforgivably pushed many of them away. And today we see the consequences of those actions. The citizenship issue should have been resolved differently because it is the foundation of the state. And now we are looking for some culprits and enemies where there are none.”

We need to look ahead Where are we stumbling today, why are we lagging behind both at the European level and in comparison with the Baltic countries? Andris Berzinsh says that we have been looking for culprits for too long, not looking ahead. “We have not learned this. We are too small to be alone. We need to be able to look for allies, not enemies. And, moving forward, we have adopted much that others are not even going to do. For example, in the issue of money laundering, we have gone so far that it is simply foolish.

We can proudly say — a major overhaul! But if we are cutting off oxygen to our own entrepreneurs, we end up where we are. And education is something we must understand as a vital necessity. Not military things, not the iron of war, but our minds — that is what we will survive with.

And management! Just talking about reducing bureaucracy will achieve nothing. We will have to go through everything, starting with the Constitution. We are a small state, but we have hung so many regulatory systems that we cannot move forward. Progress is ensured not by regulations, but by mutual trust and cooperation among people, which we have not learned. For example, if we had done even a tenth of what other world banks do, we would be at a completely different level now. And all this nonsense about competition… To pursue and listen to what guys in the sauna are drunkenly saying among themselves and initiate criminal cases for that! Even worse — some local representatives of the European prosecutor's office initiate a criminal case for the fact that a person did his job well, cared for the economic life of his region, as we see in Valmiera. Because allegedly some point of an instruction has been violated, which no one follows or even reads. It just doesn’t make sense!”

Abroad, Andris Berzinsh often heard: “You are completely crazy there, why should we get involved with you, fight, and still prove that we are not robbers.” The former president bitterly notes: “In Latvia, an entrepreneur feels like a robber.”

We need to change the political system

When asked if he sees any political force capable of changing the situation, Andris Berzinsh replies that the problem lies in the political system itself. “It’s unacceptable that we have fifty-three parties. I reviewed our Constitution and concluded that everything has its time and proportions. We urgently need to modernize our political system according to the needs of the modern world. Otherwise, in ten to twenty years, we will end up nowhere. But we continue to move irresponsibly into nowhere.

Someone shouted that we need five percent for defense, and we are taking loans for that. Who will pay this back? Or the same Rail Baltica. There is no economy behind this project; the current railway is barely breathing. And these wind farms! This is already yesterday’s news. What are we going to do with this electricity — warm our pants?

Now they are talking about a completely different type of energy that Germany is already working on together with China. This is neutrino energy from cosmic rays. And we are fiddling with wind farms.”

Andris Berzinsh believes that Latvia has enough smart and capable people, but it is necessary to create a political system that will allow these people to act and ultimately include common sense.