In his letter, the President of Latvia indicates essential elements that the Saeima Administrative–Territorial Reform Committee should integrate in legislative proposal to improve it before the second reading. President’s letter also highlights more global aspects of the regional reform.
Egils Levits underlines that ‘local council elections should promote the widest possible representation of local community interests. Legal framework should not limit the representation of interests of various local community groups at the municipal level’.
According to the letter of President Levits, local communities should be given the right to continue electing their representatives who would work with specific local community needs. They would mostly work on voluntary basis. ‘We need to keep local communities after the regional reform and give them specific responsibilities. Local communities have been culturally and historically growing around districts and towns for centuries. Such system would ensure that local residents have administration addressing local community needs closer to them and also strengthen the cultural and historical identity and sense of belonging among local residents,’ President points out in his letter.
Other functions that less-populated local communities are not capable of providing because of poor service quality or lack of adequate regional vision for broader implementation should, of course, be ensured by large cities and regional governments that will be created by regional reform.
President suggests in his letter that regional reform should draw much clearer and more precise line between levels of legal responsibility of local communities and large cities and regional governments. Clear distribution of responsibilities would make municipalities stronger and help prevent the decaying of cultural and historical identity of local communities, the sense of belonging to local community and civic responsibility for your neighbourhood.
Apart from raising above-mentioned issues about local communities, Egils Levits also indicates that sense of belonging and identity are important factors that need to be considered when determining the boundaries of large cities and regional governments after the reform.
President also makes another important proposal – to give electoral alliances possibility to nominate their candidates for municipal elections. According to Egils Levits, ‘effective banning of electoral alliance candidate lists from regional council elections is unacceptable. Such approach of the parliament would limit people’s opportunities to elect their representatives to local governments and reduce the overall democratic participation in the country. We need to do exactly the opposite. We need to offer electoral alliances broader possibilities to participate in local elections. We need to give them the right to submit their candidate lists for all large city council and regional government elections after the administrative-territorial reform’.
Egils Levits describes the special role and tasks of electoral alliances at the municipal level and underlines that democratic and civic participation of Latvian population would only grow if parliament would give like-minded groups of local activists right to submit their candidate lists for large city council and regional government elections.
President of Latvia urges to draft amendments that allow electoral alliances submit their large city council and regional government candidate lists also in large cities and regions with registered population above 5,000 people on the day when election date is announced. Egils Levits also suggests that electoral alliances would need to collect signatures of 1% of all voters in the electoral district to submit their candidate lists.
In his letter, President Levits also urges Saeima to consider a voting model that would allow voters to vote for their favourite list and also any of the candidates on other lists because ‘some local council candidates have more personal popularity and such model would enable voters to have bigger impact on outcomes’.
In conclusion, President of Latvia in his letter to the parliament reiterates his firm support for regional reform. While recognising the overall merits of the reform, President Levits emphasises the need to fine tune some of its details. Regional reform should not only boost the capacity of new municipal entities and the quality of available services, it should also strengthen democracy and identity.