Provincial imitation of leftist activities threatens to destroy the pavement of Riga

Lieske de Krijger, Deputy Head of Mission of the Dutch Embassy, very tactfully tweets about Riga's problems with snow and ice clearing. You can't go out on the street without "high heels"/snow spikes attached to your shoes.

I spent the whole of January in Liepāja and now, when I came to Riga, I was unpleasantly surprised, not to say shocked. I am of course aware of the differences in climate, and the fact that in Liepāja the snow had melted completely the week before gives it a huge advantage. At the same time, one cannot help but notice a fundamental change in the attitude of Riga's political leadership towards snow clearance in the city.

This change is driven by an equally fundamental change of ideological direction. Whereas the former Ušakovs/Ameriks Riga City Council (RCC) was electorally oriented towards the relatively poor stratum of the population and its unwritten credo was not to annoy this stratum unnecessarily, the new Staķis/Progressives RCC leadership is oriented towards radical (and therefore annoying to many) changes in the capital, following the Western European model. It sounds good - let's turn Riga into a real model city of Northern Europe - but what happens in practice?

First of all, it has to be admitted that in terms of urban design, Riga under Ušakovs started to lag far behind the latest trends in world urban planning. Thus, one can understand the new RCC's efforts to catch up. Unfortunately, when ideological orders meet reality, the result is not always what the implementers of change had hoped for, let alone those who do not want to change anything.

The problem is that ideology is one thing, but the reality outside the window, including climate conditions, is another. What works for Amsterdam, Copenhagen or even Liepāja does not really work for Riga. For the seemingly trivial reason that the climate in these cities is slightly different. Just "slightly" enough to make the result decisively different.

Why can't the new leaders of Riga see this, or are pretending that they can't?

Psychologically, the new RCC's actions are a paroxysm of provincial thinking. That is, an uncritical imitation of authority. When a young person from a remote suburb arrives in the capital, he often chooses as his main mode of behavior to observe carefully what the "local guys" are doing and to emulate them in everything. Why these local guys do this or that does not even need to be understood. The main thing is to imitate everything without thinking too much.

If in many parts of Western Europe, cities do not bother much with snow clearing (same with autumn leaf removal), we do not need to spend millions on it either. Better to use the money to build kindergartens (or so it is explained). The fact that the climate is milder there and that there is rarely a permanent snow cover is ignored. Instead, we are supposedly moving in the ideologically right direction.

Any discussion with contemporary leftists, no matter what the issue, sooner or later comes back to - well, tell me what bad things will happen if we do this or that. It is almost impossible to answer this question meaningfully, because who can predict what will happen 50 or 100 years from now if we take this or that decision today that fundamentally changes the social model?

The fact that these decisions do not have any catastrophic consequences in 10, 20 or even 50 years does not mean anything historically. For example, no one today can say for sure what the consequences of the sainthood of the black drug addict and repeatedly tried robber George Floyd will be for the USA and perhaps even for the whole Western world 20 or 50 years from now. But the consequences of an ideological shift in priorities in relation to cleaning up the streets of Riga can be seen right now. One only has to go out on the street. Unlike in other cases, here the result is so obvious that it cannot be ignored.

The basic principle of the left-wing activists - we will tear down the old throne and build a new world for ourselves - means something else in practice: we will tear down the old and then we'll see what to do next. It seems that the street sweepers of Riga have also understood the new ideological positions of the last party congress and are no longer trying to clean things up. Why should I? The snow will melt at some point anyway. So I am not going to get up at five o'clock in the morning and make life unnecessarily difficult for myself. Better to have a good night's sleep. If someone doesn't like something, let them blame Staķis. And there are things to blame him of.

The dirty streets are still just small fries. The disintegration of the pavement will be the fruit of these ideological settings. And by the fruit, you will know the tree.