Fact-checkers challenge coalition claims before elections

Coalition politicians have increasingly exaggerated their achievements as elections approach, according to an investigation by Re:Check, the fact-checking project of Re:Baltica, published by LSM.

Economics Minister Viktors Valainis of the Union of Greens and Farmers said in an interview with news agency LETA that the situation in Latvia was bleak in 2023, when his party joined Prime Minister Evika Siliņa’s government.

“The economy was down 0.9%. Stagnation with a minus sign. The Dome Square was full of teachers and medics. Farmers had been driven into the streets,” Valainis said. He also described protests across Latvia and said the government had inherited a deficit of 400 million euros.

Valainis made similar statements on the programme Kas notiek Latvijā?, saying that teachers and medics had filled the Dome Square and that tractors had taken to Latvia’s streets instead of the countryside.

Re:Check found that Valainis was correct about gross domestic product. The economy did decline in 2023 because of the recent Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, the minister significantly dramatised other events and confused their timing.

Teachers did protest in the Dome Square, but that happened in April 2023, five months before Siliņa’s government was formed. The farmers’ protest Valainis mentioned took place in February and March 2024, almost six months after the government was established.

At the time, the agriculture minister was Union of Greens and Farmers leader Armands Krauze. The protests were organised by the Farmers’ Parliament, which criticised Krauze’s work and said he had failed to meet the organisation’s previously stated demands.

Asked by LETA whether the Union of Greens and Farmers’ participation in the government had resolved problems in the affected sectors, Valainis said that questions concerning teachers, medics and farmers had been resolved within 100 days through the adoption of the 2024 budget. He also said the budget had a fiscal deficit of 3%.

Re:Check said that claim was also misleading. Parliament adopted the 2024 budget in December 2023, while farmers protested with tractors later, in February and March 2024. At least some of the money requested for teachers’ pay increases had been allocated by the previous government, when the Union of Greens and Farmers was in opposition.