Stable state needs transparent, mature party system – President

In her annual state of the nation at the parliament on Thursday, she noted that the time had come to invest in the quality of parties and party people.

“The change of generations among most of the party leaders gives rise to expectations of quality renewal. (…) The closed-door and self-interest posture of traditional parties, and sometimes even cases of criminalization, open the door to increasingly less prepared political newcomers. The chronic fragility of coalitions does not give people a feeling of security; the reform process is also stumbling without strong party backing. Now is the time to invest in the quality of parties and party people,” she said at the parliament.

In Grybauskaitė’s words, preparing to govern a state is vitally important and certainly not a one-day job.

“That nomenklatura-based traditions and corrupt tendencies will be rejected in a principled way; that those who act for money will be discarded; that short-lived populist clusters will be replaced by responsible political forces. It will be then that our people will not be concerned about economic and social threats more than about Russian invasion, terrorism and the future of the European Union,” the president emphasized.