Latvia - October 2022

The centre-right New Unity (JV) party of the incumbent Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš won 19 per cent of the vote in Latvia’s parliamentary elections on 1 October. Seven parties passed the five per cent threshold required to be represented in Parliament. The populist Stability party has replaced Harmony Social Democracy (SSD) as the largest Russophone party in Parliament. SSD had formerly been Latvia’s biggest opposition party but has lost support since publicly condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine. Overall voter turnout rose to 59 per cent - an increase of five percentage points compared to the 2018 elections. However, there was low turnout among the Latvian diaspora (only 16 per cent), partly as a result of recent amendments to election laws introducing additional requirements for opening election sites. For example, as a result of the new requirements, only nine sites were opened across the United Kingdom, where more than 130,000 Latvian citizens are registered to vote, compared to 19 during the 2018 elections. 

Sources: International IDEA, London School of Economics, Baltic News Network

On 27 October, amendments to the Election to the European Parliament Law were adopted in the Saeima, barring people who served in the Latvian Communist Party after January 1991 from running in European Parliamentary elections in Latvia. The amendment would preclude current Member of the European Parliament, including Tatjana Ždanoka, who co-chairs the Latvian Russian Union party, from running for re-election. The amendment would harmonise electoral procedures for elections to the European Parliament with those of elections to the Saeima. The Latvian Communist Party was banned in a September 1991 Supreme Court ruling, viewed as a threat to Latvian independence from the Soviet Union. 

Sources: Baltic News Network, Euractiv, Likumi