Valdis Zatlers
Valdis Zatlers was president of Latvia from 2007 to 2011, the orthopaedic surgeon who had never held office when the governing coalition chose him in a meeting at the Riga zoo, as the press reported it, and the parliament elected him in May 2007 by fifty-eight votes to forty-two over a former constitutional court judge, amid a scandal over the envelopes of cash that patients had given him, which he admitted and paid tax on. The presidency coincided with the crash, in which Latvia, which had grown at twelve per cent a year on Swedish bank credit and property, lost a quarter of its output in two years, took a seven-and-a-half-billion-euro loan from the IMF and the European Union in December 2008. It cut public pay by a quarter and pensions by a tenth. It kept the lat pegged to the euro through an internal devaluation that the economists argued about for a decade and that Latvia entered the euro on in 2014. It ended with the act that made him. On 28 May 2011, after the parliament had refused to lift the immunity of a deputy the anti-corruption bureau wanted to search, he used the constitution's never-used article 48 to call a referendum on dissolving the parliament, which the voters approved in July by ninety-four per cent, the first dissolution in the country's history. The parliament, five days after his announcement, declined to re-elect him, choosing Andris Bērziņš instead. He was born in Riga in 1955, studied medicine at the Riga Medical Institute, worked at the Riga hospital of traumatology and orthopaedics for twenty-two years and ran it from 1994. He spent time at Yale and Syracuse, was a volunteer at Chernobyl in 1986, and sang in the Riga choir. He had been a member of the Popular Front in 1988 and of nothing since. The Zatlers Reform Party he founded in July 2011 came second in the election of September that year with twenty per cent and joined the government. Then it split and dissolved by 2014, which was the fate of most new Latvian parties. He sat in the parliament until 2014 and has practised and lectured since. He is the president the parliament punished for having asked the people, which the people remember.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: Latvian
- Roles: president, physician, politician
