Experts assess parties’ crisis choices in election simulation

Experts have assessed how teams from the Union of Greens and Farmers, the National Alliance and Stabilitātei! responded to a fictional crisis in the pre-election simulation X Hour in Silgale, produced by LTV’s Aizliegtais paņēmiens programme.

The teams had to decide whether to apologise to the widow of a deceased person, deploy the National Guard in the city or request NATO consultations after threats. Political scientist Jānis Ikstens said all three teams understood the seriousness of the situation.

Mārtiņš Vargulis, a lecturer at Rīga Stradiņš University and managing partner of the analytics group PowerHouse Latvia, said political forces should communicate with the public earlier and assess the risks of further escalation more carefully.

Only Stabilitātei! supported apologising to the widow and temporarily suspending the police chief. The National Alliance chose to express sympathy instead of apologising.

All three teams said they would first speak to participants in the tent camp. The National Alliance rejected municipal assistance in removing small flags from the widow’s fence. The Union of Greens and Farmers initially chose to wait before involving the prime minister.

None of the teams supported an immediate evacuation from Silgale. Both experts viewed Stabilitātei!’s proposal to contact the person who had made the threats critically. Vargulis was cautious about deploying the National Guard at an early stage but supported requesting NATO consultations after the threats.

How the simulation worked

Silgale is a fictional city of about 7,000 residents located 12 kilometres from the Russian border. The incident and its participants were also fictional. Actors and artificial intelligence were used in videos for the training simulation.

In a stylised crisis management centre, party representatives had to decide how to respond if a local conflict developed into social division and an external threat. Each party delegated five representatives.

All teams received the same three stories and questions in the form of security service reports. They could answer yes, no or propose their own solution, with three minutes allowed for each decision.

The events in each subsequent part were the same for all parties and did not depend on their earlier decisions. As a result, choosing to express sympathy or remove the flags did not lead to different developments later in the simulation.

The experts assessed an edited version of the game. It was the first of three pre-election simulation programmes. Nine political forces were selected to take part because their support in the SKDS poll used for the selection exceeded 2 percent.