Latvia is the least democratic of the European Union member states
Such conclusions arise from a report published last week by Transparency International, entitled "Global Corruption Barometer - EU 2021."
As already reported, at the request of Transparency International, a survey of citizens in all EU member states was conducted at the end of 2020 to find out about corruption in the European Union. In Latvia, the survey was conducted by Kantar TNS Latvia (in October and November 2020) and involved 1,001 respondents. One of the results was the conclusion that the people of Latvia consider the government of Krišjānis Kariņš to be one of the most corrupt governments in the European Union.
However, this is not the most shocking result from the Transparency International report. According to the results of the survey, Latvia is the least democratic of the European Union member states.
According to the results of the survey,
less than 13% of all Latvian respondents agree with the statement: "The government in my country takes the views of people like me into account when making decisions."
This is the worst result among all EU Member States. The EU average is 30%. By contrast, 62% of Finns and almost half of the population of Ireland, Malta and the Netherlands agree with this statement.
According to the author's summary of Latvian respondents' answers, 0.7% of respondents indicated that they did not know the answer to this question, but 63.8% of respondents disagree with the statement that Krišjānis Kariņš's government takes into account the interests of ordinary people when making decisions. On this question, the people of Croatia, Poland, Bulgaria and France are even more critical than the people of Latvia. According to the Transparency International report, women across the EU are much less likely than men to believe that the government takes the needs of ordinary people into account when making decisions.
You don't have to be clairvoyant to understand how Latvia has become the most undemocratic EU member state. The voluntarism and the arbitrariness shown by the government of Krišjānis Kariņš in implementing administrative-territorial reform, manipulation with tax changes, calling them reforms and ignoring the real needs of taxpayers, corruption games with the distribution of funds for overcoming the crisis, and other actions have left their consequences, and now they create a very unfavorable international reputation for Latvia. In addition, the results obtained by Transparency International refer to the end of 2020. The decisions of Krišjānis Kariņš's government that were made after that surpassed what was done in 2020 in their irrationality, therefore during the last six months, the opinion of the Latvian population about Krišjānis Kariņš's government's actions being in the public interest has probably not improved, but even deteriorated.