Will the parliament manage to approve a new Minister of Defense tomorrow?
It is quite possible that tomorrow the parliament will find itself "adrift": if the "progressives" leave the ruling coalition, that is, the government, or remain but declare that they no longer consider themselves bound by the coalition agreement. In such a scenario, there will no longer be a classic division between ruling deputies and the opposition in the Saeima, and therefore voting on many bills and individual amendments will become completely unpredictable! Perhaps this will help the opposition to push their initiatives through the Saeima, particularly the amendments to the Law on State Social Assistance, prepared by deputies of the "Latvia First" faction. The essence of the amendments is to increase the amount of the child care benefit in the first one and a half years of life for families that had a low salary or had no salary at all. Currently, the child care benefit is equivalent to the minimum social benefit, which amounts to 298 euros! Parliamentarians believe that if the state genuinely supports improving the demographic situation, the benefit should be raised to the level of the minimum wage, that is, to 780 euros.
Also on the agenda is a popular public initiative regarding the right of residents to choose their savings in the second pension level. On the portal manabalss.lv, this proposal from one of the activists quickly gathered more than 10,000 signatures from citizens of Latvia, and the Saeima's mandate commission will propose tomorrow to send this initiative for further discussion in the budget commission. Let us remind you that the collection of signatures for a referendum on the same topic regarding the withdrawal of pension savings is still ongoing.
There is less and less time until the elections, which means that "language" proposals will appear even more frequently on the agenda - the deputies of the National Alliance continue to feverishly search for areas of public life where the Russian language is still permitted. This Thursday, language proposals from the National Alliance deputies will be considered in the plenary session regarding the Law... on road traffic! Nationalists propose banning the CSDD from conducting driving tests in Russian. It should be noted that even now, Latvians cannot take the driving test in Russian - this right is reserved only for foreigners. Additionally, deputies want to prohibit merchants from organizing driver training (theory and practice) in Russian. The relevant Saeima commission did not support these amendments, and now everything will be decided in the plenary session.
The main intrigue is whether the deputies will approve Raivis Melnišs as the Minister of Defense tomorrow. So far, this scenario seems unlikely - even if the partners of "New Unity" in the government agree to consider this candidacy, they still need to get to know... this person. "We don’t even know him at all!" one of the leaders of the Union of Greens and Farmers, Uldis Augulis, admitted today on Latvian TV.
