| Yesterday, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus introduced Social Democrat Zigmantas Balcytis to parliament as a candidate for the post of Prime Minister. Now 52, Mr. Balcytis serves as interim finance minister, social security minister and prime minister of Lithuania. Voting on this candidacy in the Sejm will take place in a week. Although President Adamkus sympathizes with the right, he chose the left, realizing that the Sejm would not have approved the conservative candidate anyway. The President entrusted the creation of a new ruling coalition to a bloc of center-left forces.
The cabinet of Algirdas Brazauskas resigned on May 31 after the Labor Party, one of the partners in the four-party coalition, withdrew five of its ministers. This was the response of the Trudoviks to the attacks of the opposition and the actions of law enforcement agencies, who conducted searches in the party headquarters and in the house of its leader Viktor Uspaskich.
Zygmantas Balcytis graduated from Vilnius University, receiving education as an economist with a mathematical focus. He worked in the Ministry of Food Industry of the Lithuanian SSR, and was deputy director of the Lithuanian National Philharmonic. In 2000 he was elected to the Sejm, in 2001 he was appointed Minister of Transport, and in 2005 he became Minister of Finance. Mr. Balcytis has already promised to continue the policies of the previous cabinet. Yesterday in the Sejm he did not answer the question whether his cabinet would demand from Russia “payment for damages for the occupation.”
The nomination of Balcytis does not mean that the crisis is over. The ruling coalition has only 53 parliamentarians. In total, there are 141 seats in the Sejm; for the stable functioning of the left coalition, at least 14 more votes are required. Representatives of the right-wing forces, which hold 47 seats in the Sejm, promised to vote against Balcytis. Neither the left nor the right has a majority, and the president’s attempt to push the Social Democrats and Conservatives to create a broad “rainbow” coalition was unsuccessful. Lithuanian political scientists do not rule out early parliamentary elections. Vladimir SKRIPOV, Vilnius
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