The hugely popular president can’t make impromptu restaurant appearances now, but she was barely known in Latvia before she became president in 1999. She lived most of her life in Canada, part of a die-hard Latvian diaspora that guarded the idea of a free homeland for the five decades of Soviet rule that followed after Stalin and Hitler’s notorious division of East Europe in 1939. The ensuing to-ing and fro-ing of armies across the Baltics is a footnote to most people’s recollection of World War II, but the defining national catastrophe for Latvia.
The émigré community is close. Vike-Freiberga’s family joined the French-flight from newly independent Morocco in 1954 and settled in Toronto, an emerging center for the Latvian diaspora. “By that time the ‘when’ was becoming an ‘if’ Latvia ever became independent,” says the president. With the Soviet Union at the height of its powers the emphasis among émigrés shifted to resisting the New World melting pot and passing the torch of Latvianness from generation to generation.
With independence restored in 1991, a steady tide of second and third generation Latvians poured into the country, to reclaim property seized by the Soviet Union and to lend their expertise in rebuilding the country. In 1999 Vike-Freiberga, by then a seasoned ambassador for Latvia-in-exile, triumphed as a non-partisan candidate when parliament was deadlocked in its choice of a head of state.
Since then the job has consisted by and large of trumpeting Latvia’s progress in Western integration abroad and slapping a presidential veto on any legislation at home that threatens the cherished goals of EU and NATO membership. Vike-Freiberga has lobbied foreign heads of state and disciplined domestic politicians with the iron capitalist will of Margaret Thatcher and the refugee-made-good vigor of Madeleine Albright.
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