Latvia just saw the rise of a new political party that passes what I like to call the “Alfred E. Neuman” test — from the strange little character in the American Mad Magazine who sometimes was captioned “not insane”.

About 385 mainly 30 to 45-year-old Latvians founded a new center-populist -ish party led by an eccentric renegade member of parliament who filmed most of his own political activities with a palm-sized miniature video camera.

Artuss Kaimiņš, a surly, sometimes deliberately offensive former stage and film actor, was elected chairmen of newly founded the “Who Owns the State?” (Kam pieder valsts — KPV) party on May 3. It is the newest party in the small Baltic state of around two million, where, back in the 1930s, having 25 parties in the 100-member parliament was nothing unusual. Since regaining its independence in 1991, Latvia has set a 5% threshold for any party to be seated in the parliament or Saeima.

Throughout the roughly four-hour founding event. Mr. Kaimiņš — who had left his camera at home — was soft-spoken compared to his sometimes bombastic speeches in the Saeima.

Artuss Kaimiņš, the chairman of the new “Who Owns the State” party in Latvia (photo, Juris Kaža)

His supporters cheered and gave a standing ovation after a unanimous vote to officially found KPV. They also cheered when the party program — stressing the centrality of taxpayers and their interests in responsible and efficient government spending and services — was approved in a similar vote.

Potential founding members lined up for almost two hours to pay EUR 20 and present identification and be admitted to the KPV’s first convention at a large concert hall in Riga’s Old Town. The line to join the new taxpayer-centered party at times spilled into the street by the concert hall and consisted mainly of well-dressed middle class people with a smattering of older persons of retirement age. A number of delegates had come from Latvian migrant communities in Ireland and the United Kingdom, leading Mr. Kaimiņš to urge a quick completion of the convention agenda so that some participants could catch evening flights back.

The founding of the new party came amidst major scandals and a shakeup at Latvia’s State Revenue Service and the spectacle of a major, historic Riga street torn up and mostly closed to traffic for the second time in weeks to repair underground infrastructure defects found after the street was renovated and repaved by hand with special paving stones and bricks. The “perpetual dig” on a main shopping street was repeatedly mentioned on social media as an example of municipal waste and incompetence.

KPV faces two electoral tests in the next two years — the municipal elections in 2017, seen as a bellwether for all parties in Latvia for the national elections a year later, and the 2018, 100th-anniversary of Latvian independence elections in the fall of that year. Riga, the capital, is where the in-the-bureaucrat’s face, how are you spending my money attitude could be a test-bed for later, providing the KPV doesn’t play the ethnic card but sticks to the fiscal facts.

Among nationalist voters, the current mayor Nils Ušakovs of the (faux??) social democratic Harmony (S) party is already despised just for being an ethnic Russian and heading a party that has official ties with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia. However, those focused on how their tax money is spent should avoid the ethnic card and ask how all of Mr. Ušakovs’ expensive good works will be paid for. And first, one should ask — why the f**k are so many streets being dug up as summer approaches, and why some are being irrationally dug up twice?

All persons attending the founding meeting — including accredited media — had to sign a code of proper behavior, promising to refrain from personal attacks, vulgarity and swearing. This led one commentator on social media to say that everyone was being asked “not to behave the way Artuss does” toward the media and others he sees as his adversaries. Indeed, Mr. Kaimiņš was unusually cooperative with television interviewers, whom he had treated with visible contempt after his election to the Saeima in 2014.

The code also included a promise not to use alcoholic beverages or other intoxicants during the KPV convention. Two female bloggers were surprised to get a bag of food and drinks — allegedly from Mr. Kaimiņš — that contained wine. The women — authors of a blog called “We drink and write texts” in Latvian — said they didn’t consume any of the gifts and assumed the delivery of the bag to the press section of the auditorium was a joke or a provocation.

If it does succeed in the 2018 elections, KPV will be the third “pop-up” party to get seated in the Latvian parliament in recent years. Two parties — From the Heart for Latvia (No sirds Latvijai/NSL) and the Latvian Regional Alliance — from which Mr. Kaimiņš defected — were formed ahead of the 2014 national elections. The now defunct Reform Party (founded as “Zatlers’ Reform Party) was formed by then President Valdis Zatlers after he dissolved the Saeima in 2011. By the 2014 election, the Reform Party, as Latvians say, had gone down “the pine-needle strewn path” (a reference to the path decorated with pine branches taken by a funeral procession at a Latvian cemetery). Other “new” parties in the past (such as the People’s Party of oligarch and former Prime Minister Andris Šķēle) have had somewhat longer death throes.

This is not to say that the KPV will go the same way. Mr. Kaimiņš has not put his name in the party’s name, though people still associate his personality with it. But now that KPV has moved from idea to reality, it also looks like any batshit ideas have been shed and many of the sharp corners of Mr. Kaimiņš style of attack and passive aggressive politics seem to have been filed away. At the end of the day, KPV is beginning to look like a centrist, fiscally conservative party backing moderate, wage earner and small-enterprise friendly tax policy, which, at the same time, promises to increase spending on the habitual “orphan children” of the Latvian state budget — health care and education, to name a few. This is either schizoid or reflects a belief that cutting bureaucracies with an executioner’s axe and asking any terrified survivors to justify and account for every cent they spend will free up funds inefficiently spent and wasted and reallocate them to real priorities. Latvia’s Finance Minister Dana Reizniece-Ozola recently announced that an audit had found some EUR 50 million that simply turned up, like change jingling in a clothes drier or found between the cushions of a sofa. Who knows, the KPV’s focused waste and savings hunters may find even more.