Today Arūnas Valinskas was forced to stand down after failing a vote of no confidence in the Seimas. The vote was called after President Dalia Grybauskaitė told him to resign from the post, a request he refused.

Valinskas, who has had a long career in showbiz and a short career in politics, found himself in hot water after a former colleague of his in his National Resurrection Party leaked the information that he had been involved with a notorious brigade of gangsters based in Kaunas.

Many officials, including the President, told him that it was all over red rover and that he had to stand down from what is widely regarded as the second most important position in the country, the parliamentary speaker.

The parliamentary speaker is heir to the president’s post should they die or be forced to stand down for some reason.

It stands to reason that people involved with organized crime should not be in positions of influence, at the heart of the government where they have access to sensitive information and the ability to affect change.

While the rest of the Seimas members did the right thing kicking him out of the position, it seems that Valinskas doesn’t understand whats going on around him.

Minutes after the decision was handed down in the Seimas, Valinskas appeared before journalists and, among other things, said that he would enjoy driving his own car again to work and back, instead of being driven. He also said that he would not become a “political corpse” and that he wouldn’t be chased out of his work as a regular parliamentarian.

This man who has a very limited experience in politics, at just under a year, doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation he has created for himself and the country. He somehow managed to get elected to one of the country’s most senior positions and immediately began abusing his power to get information in order to benefit criminal gangs.

The fact that he allegedly abused his power and then didn’t even resign entirely from the parliament smacks of pure impunity. Valinskas has become everything he promised his party would change — corrupt politicians in the Seimas. Hardly a “national resurrection.”

It would be too obvious to quote George Orwell’s stories, so I won’t go into it, but it is an interesting point that even those who the citizens turned to in desperation for a new brand of politicians who would set the place straight, can’t keep it together.

I’d like to believe that not all people are intrinsically prone to serious corruption and that this one foolish man was just overawed by the new found power that he found for himself. I would hope that it was just his inexperience, and perhaps lack of ability to think straight, that led to his sacking from the speaker’s position.

But, perhaps this is a lesson that Lithuania needs to learn. While the old guard of politicians are not ideal and make backroom deals and accept kickbacks and all that, you can’t just replace them with idealists who are good at telling jokes and singing and dancing. I hope they wouldn’t send out Andrius Kubilius and his coalition for the EuroBasket ’09. Well, they couldn’t do any worse now could they?

For Lithuanians, unfortunately all this tomfoolery is not new and they probably expected it, but I do know that they tried to make a serious change by voting in so many of these celebrities to try to set the Seimas on the straight and narrow.

Also unfortunate is the well-recognized trait of impatience and short-sightedness in the general populace that lead them to make these sorts of decisions when voting in the first place — they saw a problem, but went for a quick and unlikely fix.

Perhaps they will learn from this, or perhaps they won’t. If you ask me, there isn’t much choice for them anyway, Valinskas has shown. Let’s hope he and his band of followers fall into line and take their work seriously from now on — they do after all have another three years in power.

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Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.