June will mark one year since the Saeima supported the decision to dissolve the Rezekne City Council. The city was in financial difficulties, unable to adopt its budget. Before that, Rezekne Mayor Aleksandrs Bartasevics lost his post. Now he has founded a new party, Together For Latvia, which will again fight for seats on the council on a joint list with Latvia First party. Although the competition for seats in the city is one of the fiercest in the whole country with candidates from ten lists running for the elections, the politician considers his and his party's victory in the municipal elections in Rezekne a "statement of fact".

Can you tell us what you were doing when you were not a member of the Rezekne City Council?

Most of the time has been spent building and strengthening the party. Of course, we are preparing for the municipal elections. We will run in Rezekne, Daugavpils, Rezekne municipality, Ludza municipality and Jekabpils municipality. As we are cooperating with Latvia First party led by Ainars Slesers, we have also offered our members to their list in Riga. Therefore, it can be said that we are also participating in the elections in Riga.

We are a new party and we are running for the elections for the first time. We also had a plan to run in the European Parliament elections, but there, in my opinion, the process of founding the party was artificially delayed and we did not have enough time to meet the legal requirement that a party must be established at least a year before the elections. But we supported Slesers' party, and I believe that our support was decisive for Vilis Kristopans becoming a member of the European Parliament.

Does your agreement with Latvia First mean that you yourself have ambitions to return to "big politics" and run in the parliamentary elections?

Yes, and we are not hiding these plans. In 2026, we plan to run in the parliamentary elections with Latvia First and win. I do not know yet how this will formally manifest itself, but we will run, and I believe that we have every chance of being in a coalition, if not leading it.

Are you personally planning to run?

Yes, I will run and in our joint list I will definitely lead the list of the Latgale region. There is no secret here.

How do you rate your chances in the municipal elections?

First, we hope to win seats in all municipalities where we are running. At the moment, our party is not represented only in Daugavpils. We have studied the situation and we can at least qualify for one seat in Daugavpils. And since the situation is very volatile, this one lawmaker can also be the owner of a "golden card" and claim a seat in the ruling coalition of the Daugavpils City Council.

I am not even talking about Rezekne. There I have no doubt that we will win. This is not an expectation, but a statement of fact.

In Ludza, too, we have formed a coalition with the Latvian Socialist Party. I think that we will win more seats than in the previous elections.

In Jekabpils, we already have a representative. We are trying to gather all the worthy candidates under our party. I believe that we have succeeded, and we will definitely have two or three lawmakers in Jekabpils.

We also intend to win in the Rezekne municipality. I think that the idea of merging the city of Rezekne and the municipality is right, because I do not see at the moment how the Rezekne municipality could develop without merging with the city. It is evident that where large cities have merged with municipalities, everyone benefits. Rezekne municipality is stagnating without the city.

So, in your opinion, the two municipalities should have been merged immediately during the administrative-territorial reform?

Yes. The year 2029 was marked as the time for the merger of the municipalities, then it was cancelled. Now it is clear that the merger was the right decision and should be done as quickly as possible. The law also provides that if two municipalities want to, they can merge.

The newly-formed political force Let’s Go, Latgale! will also run in Rezekne. Do you see opportunities for cooperation?

I think they have a chance to get seats in the Rezekne City Council. I am positive about cooperation not only with Let’s Go, Latgale!, but also with other parties. I see only one potential obstacle - whether everyone is ready to work for Rezekne. Before the Rezekne City Council was dissolved, the opposition showed no such willingness. The opposition has not voted for a single budget in all these years. I felt nothing but resistance from them. If this trend changes, we are ready to cooperate. Although Let’s Go, Latgale! list leaders are strangers to Rezekne - from Riga or Daugavpils - we hope to be able to build cooperation.

You said that your victory in Rezekne is already a statement of fact. How many seats do you expect to win?

Eight seats - just like we had before.

But will not your merger with Slesers reduce the willingness of your traditional electorate to vote for the list?

Of course, we analyzed it from the point of view of whether it would help or harm us. At the moment, I cannot say that we will get fewer votes as a result. On the contrary. Slesers is a very attractive political figure, and if we take the economy, which is a determining factor in municipal elections, then our views are absolutely the same.

I, too, believe that the main problem of municipalities is the weak development of industries, and only there can we look for reserves for the development of municipalities. So, it is business support, new industrial zones, new jobs and higher wages. This can only be achieved through industrial development.

We are also responsible not only for our own municipality, but also for the surrounding municipalities. Rezekne is responsible for Rezekne municipality, for Ludza municipality and for all the surrounding areas. Even from Ludza, many people come to work in Rezekne. We need to see what we can gain from this cooperation.

The main person in the municipality is the businessman. We see that Slesers is going to implement the same policy in Riga, and it is only through such development that we can get additional income for the budget, not through tax rates or other administrative decisions. The solution is, first, to optimize the work of the municipality and, second, to develop entrepreneurship in the municipality.

Your election program mentions both support for entrepreneurship and the development of industrial parks, but where are you going to get the funds for this, given that the municipal budget situation is not brilliant?

It is another myth that Rezekne is in a special situation, and we will easily show this to everyone with our work after the elections. There are municipalities where the financial situation is much worse.

Of course, the Finance Ministry is now in the position that it will not allow us to take loans for at least five years. At least, that is what the representatives of the interim administration are saying. So, we will have to look internally for reserves, and we know how to do that. I will mention 2009, when Latvia and Rezekne experienced a unique crisis. There were elections in the middle of the year, we started to work and we had to cut spending by 30 percent. We did it, and we put the city on the road to development. Why, given our experience, could we not do it now? I have no reason to think that we will not be able to build the industrial zone, because the majority of the funding there - 85 percent - comes from the European Union (EU) structural funds.

Of course, we have to think about the bridge. Here, however, we have to take into account the unequal treatment of Rezekne, because a similar bridge in Daugavpils has received both the EU and state funding - a total of EUR 10 million. As a result, Daugavpils will not invest anything to repair the bridge. In Rezekne, we can only count on getting perhaps 50 percent of the funding from EU funds; we were refused loans. Of course, the project does not cost as much as in Daugavpils and we want to invest EUR 4 million to rebuild the main infrastructure of the city, which is now simply crumbling. Of course, the government should also explain why there is such a negative attitude towards Rezekne.

We also see that there would have been no crisis in the city and the losses would have been smaller if the loan had been granted in 2023, as the law requires. Then we would have solved all our problems ourselves. This was done to create and deepen the crisis in the first place. Yes, we understand the situation, but we hope for a fair treatment from the government.

At the same time, the court of first instance ruled that you were lawfully removed as the mayor of Rezekne. You have appealed against the verdict. Does that mean that you still hold the view that it was not legal and that it was a political set-up?

Yes, they are links in the same chain. It all started with an initiated crisis in Rezekne, followed by my suspension, then I appealed, and out of 11 so-called offenses, there were two left for which I could be suspended. I believe that one of these arguments is clearly invalid, namely that I illegally signed the contract for the construction of the SPA center. This is absurd, because the municipal by-laws provide that there are exceptional cases in which the council chairman can sign the contract. This was the case here. There was a procurement, the procurement committee approved the decision and I signed it. The interpretation of the court is that, if the value of the contract is above EUR 70,000, the decision must be approved by the council.

Still, the second infringement relates to the breach of the budget adoption procedure.

Both the State Audit Office and the Finance Ministry have very cleverly written why this is an infringement. But no one has proved that there was a breach of procedure on my part. The decision on the budget is a collegial one, it is taken by the members of the council, including me. The opposition lawmakers said that information had not been available to them. On the contrary, the information was available to everyone, everyone knew about it, everyone took part - who wanted to, of course - in the work groups who prepared the budget. The fact that there was an irregularity can only be said with great effort. Not to see the obvious is a kind of 'fiction' on the part of the Finance Ministry. That is why it happened.

Here I would like to return to the statements from the interim administration that Rezekne will be treated poorly by the government, that no loans will be granted. Even if it delays our development, nobody cares. We are not asking for money to survive, as other municipalities do to fulfil their basic functions. We are asking money for development, for those projects that are waiting in line. All the projects have been slowed down by the interim administration, and that was their task. We have lost two years with this. We are ready for more rapid development and breakthrough.

Do you still believe that a SPA center in Rezekne is necessary?

As for the SPA, the interim administration could have been more active, because when the Rezekne City Council was dissolved, a big conference had been planned to attract all potential investors. The interim administration shelved it. There was EU Structural Fund funding, and that is a certain sign of quality for this project, because they check everything from A to Z. We passed that test, Aluksne, for example, did not.

In today's situation, we do not see any more opportunities to attract an internal investor, because most of the hotels are being sold now. This is bad news. But we are looking with hope, for example, to Chinese investors, to investors from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and we will work with them in particular. We will have the conference that I mentioned, and I hope that everything will happen there.

Our aim is not to lease the SPA complex so that it can just start functioning, for example, to a hospital, but to lease it to an investor who will then build a hotel. Then the complex will start working as it was intended from the start.

Do you see potential for cooperation with Chinese and UAE investors, getting inspired from Slesers’ plans in Riga?

We are looking at all possible options to develop the site. Yes, circumstances are changing, because in terms of timeframe, this project is already taking very long time, because the idea came up ten years ago. Obviously, if the Chinese are there now, that is very good, if the UAE - even better. From our point of view, the safest investor is, of course, a local one, but unfortunately there are no local ones.

I believe that this project is a tourism magnet for the Latgale region. We will show that people in Latvia do not have to go to Druskininkai Spa, Tartu or Parnu. This service is actually very popular, and we calculated in the business plan that even just Latvian tourists would be enough. We also arranged the whole surroundings so that this facility would be a highlight, a special story.

In principle, Rezekne can become a tourist center of Latgale and develop the region further.

What you mentioned in the election program is restoration of public transport discounts for the residents of Rezekne. Do you think that Rezekne could afford the cheapest public transport tickets among the large cities?

When we introduced free public transport rides, we did the calculations and we had the forecasts of how it would affect expenditure. We saw that expenditure increased by EUR 100,000-150,000. Now that free rides have been abolished, it is unlikely that the revenue will be, as forecast, EUR 300,000.

We will restore these discounts, and it will be around EUR 100,000 in the budget that we will have to pay extra. It has already been evidenced that, when discounts are removed, we reduce people's willingness to use public transport. Buses are running half empty and even completely empty. This means that public transport is not fulfilling its function.

But this means that the transport company has to be subsidized by the municipality.

There are specific rules on how subsidies are allocated and the municipality gives subsidies regardless of the number of passengers. More or less, but the amount of the subsidy does not vary much because of this. Nor do municipal companies receive subsidies that allow them to afford a luxurious life.

We also have the idea of merging the transport networks in the city and the municipality. Everything revolves around the city anyway and regional routes are centered on Rezekne. School buses work in the Rezekne municipality anyway, and no one else is allowed on them, not even parents of the pupils. They also run only in the morning and in the evening. This is not efficient. The fleet of buses that perform this function is huge, and it is not rational. I propose to merge the city and regional public transport routes and add school buses, which are currently used inefficiently. Yes, first of all, these buses will have to transport pupils, but why cannot parents of pupils use them as well?

Then we can have better transport in the district and spend less money.

Times are difficult, there are many problems, and if we just work with some standard methods, then we will not get the result we want. We need to think and act outside the box.

In the election program, you promise that you will also provide information in the languages of national minorities. In which languages and how are you going to do that, because it does not really fit with the legislation?

There are certainly no plans to break the legislation, but where it is possible, for example when dealing with residents, if they and we speak a different language, why not speak it? But, of course, without breaking the law.

How do you see it? I am now asking about the information provided by the municipality, which you promise to provide also in minority languages. Will there be a municipal website in Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Polish?

Everything that is not prohibited by law. We will look for ways to do it. I cannot name specific measures yet, but I can assure you of my willingness to do so. I believe that it is not normal that we exclude a third of the Latvian population who would like to receive information in a particular language.

If Slesers and I are running for the leadership of the government in 2026, we will certainly think about how to change this situation.

Rezekne residents mentioned on social media that former coalition members of the Rezekne City Council did not participate in the commemorative events marking the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Will the municipality, under your leadership, organize events in support of Ukraine in the future?

When we were in charge of the city council, we sent goods to Ukraine, including a generator. Well, I do not know how else to show support.

Maybe you can take part in an event demonstrating support to Ukraine?

Is it more important to take part in events than to give material aid to Ukraine? I do not think so. Nor do I recall having refused to participate in any official event in support of Ukraine. Our members have now not taken part in a number of events in Rezekne, and it was not our official duty to do so.

Now we have this image here that we are the adversaries of Ukraine. Not all actions are based on this concept. I will say that I love the Ukrainian people, my wife has roots in Ukraine. I do not see any reason not to love Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

It is planned that the new chairmen of regional councils will have to undergo an assessment on state security clearance. In addition, you have an active legal case concerning the declaration of an official. Do you think that the proceedings will not interfere with the clearance?

That is a matter for the authorities granting the clearance. I am somehow sure that I will not be granted a security clearance.

At the moment, when I read the law, I cannot find a reason that I cannot become chairman of the council without a security clearance.

Since the procedure for granting a security clearance is quite secretive, it may be granted, it may not be granted, and not only to Bartasevics and [Daugavpils City Council Chairman Andrejs] Elksnins, but also to some other politicians. For example, Slesers, if he wins the Riga City Council elections. This situation plays in favor of New Unity, but all the other parties feel threatened.

Earlier it was reported that Raimonds Olehno, the Executive Director of Rezekne, quit his post precisely because he was not granted security clearance. Do you have any information to confirm this?

He was not granted security clearance. And then there is the question of why it was not granted. We cannot even find it out. It is a rather strange situation, so I will return to the thesis that this was done not to protect the country from any hostile elements, but to clear the political field. I do not think that is right. The public needs to know why this politician is not trustworthy. At the moment, state secrecy can prevent certain political activities, because the aim of every politician is to be in a leading position and to be in power. If this instrument prevents this, then something is wrong in our democracy.