LATVIA: The former Soviet state of Latvia, the last of the prospective new members to vote on joining the European Union, yesterday celebrated a resounding "yes" at a weekend referendum.
But the victory may be cold comfort for the prime minister Mr Einars Repse whose rightwing coalition now appears in danger of collapse. Latvia's EU future assured, junior coalition partners may now mount a challenge to Mr Repse as early as this week.
Analysts said Mr Repse, accused by rivals of "authoritarian" leadership, can draw on support in his own New Era Party. But extended political wrangling could raise uncertainty within the EU and NATO over preparations to join those groupings next year.
In the EU vote, supporters led nay-sayers by 67 per cent to 32.3 per cent with turnout at 72.5 percent.
Many of Latvia's pro-Brussels voters hailed EU membership as the crowning achievement of the ex-Soviet satellite's "return to Europe" after more than a decade of painful reforms since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
"For Latvia this is putting the final full stop to the sequels of the second world war, and wiping out forever the divisions on the map of Europe that the odious Molotov-Ribbentrop pact...placed there," the president, Ms Vaira Vike-Freiberga, said as she voted in the small Baltic nation of 2.3 million people.
Under secret protocols of a non-aggression pact signed in 1939 by the Soviet and Nazi German foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the then-independent Latvian state fell under Soviet control while Poland was partitioned.
(Reuters)