Levits threatened the coalition with the dismissal of the Saeima

After talks with President Egils Levits, the National Alliance (Nacionālā apvienība) and the New Conservative Party (Jaunā konservatīvā partija) have changed their positions on whether Varakļāni is in Latgale or Vidzeme. The President's rhetoric suggested that when inviting party representatives to a meeting, he had warned them of the possibility of dismissing the Saeima if the coalition partners opposed the Constitutional Court's ruling.

Last Friday, the Constitutional Court declared that within the framework of the administrative-territorial reform it recognized the annexation of Varakļāni to Rēzekne as inconsistent with the basic law of the state.

The Constitution stipulates that the Constitutional Court “is entitled to declare laws or other enactments or parts thereof invalid.” In its turn, the Constitutional Court Law stipulates that its “judgement and the interpretation of the relevant legal norm provided therein shall be obligatory for all State and local government authorities.”

In response to the Constitutional Court ruling, the Saeima tried to adapt the Law on Administrative Territories and Populated Areas to the ruling on Monday, but when the National Alliance and the New Conservative Party expressed distrust of the Constitutional Court ruling, its order in the first reading of the bill was ignored.

Levits could not ignore such blatant disregard for the law, and on Tuesday he summoned the leaders of the coalition parties. The information provided by the Chancellery of the President shows that E. Levits reminded the deputies: Latvia is a state governed by the rule of law, and it follows that the Saeima is obliged to comply with the Constitutional Court's rulings, otherwise the actions of the parliament will lead to a constitutional crisis. The invited politicians agreed that a constitutional crisis cannot be allowed.

A few hours after this meeting, the plan to prevent the constitutional crisis was implemented by adopting a law stipulating that Varakļāni municipality will remain a separate municipality for now. In its turn, the Cabinet of Ministers will have to submit proposals to the Saeima regarding the administrative territory of Varakļāni municipality by January 1, 2022. It is planned that municipal elections will take place on September 11 in the separate Varakļāni municipality.

Such a rapid change of views of the coalition partners could come as a surprise, but the 2008 opinion of the former Constitutional Law Committee under the auspices of the former President Valdis Zatlers on the early improvement of the voting mechanism by Saeima introduces some clarity.

The committee, led 13 years ago by Egils Levits, stated that "a special type of national crisis is the constitutional crisis" and that early elections are one of the mechanisms for resolving such a crisis.

"This mechanism is recognized both in theory and in practice by parliamentary democratic republics. This is based on the consideration that maintaining the composition of an elected parliament until the end of the legislature is not an end in itself and that parliament has neither the political nor the moral right to do so. As the parliament is not a sovereign but only a representative body, it follows that there can be no absolute and unrestricted right of the parliament to act in disregard of the overriding interests of the sovereign - and therefore of the people... Dismissal of the parliament and early elections from a crisis caused not by the people but by the activities of its elected representative body, the parliament [..] is given back to the people to decide about. The people then review the political mandate granted to parliament and return it in a revised and modified form. These are the logical rights of the nation as a sovereign in relations with its representative body - the parliament,” wrote the committee headed by E. Levits three years before V. Zatlers' historical order no. 2.

In order to make sure that Neatkarīgā's assumption about the tools used by E. Levits in working with disobedient coalition parties is true, we asked Arvils Ašeradens (New Unity, Jaunā Vienotība) who was present at the meeting.

The politician confirmed that the chairman of the New Unity Saeima faction Ainars Latkovskis asked E. Levits a direct question: what will happen if the majority of the Saeima does not follow the judgment of the Constitutional Court? The answer was just as direct.

E. Levits reminded that he is the guardian of the Constitution and if the Saeima violates the basic law of the state, he will have no choice but to initiate the dismissal of the 13th Saeima by handing over its fate to the electorate.

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