Election Campaign

For the last four years, Lithuania had been ruled by a conservative-liberal coalition government. In this period, the country gained notoriety for its geopolitical stand against Russia and China in the name of human rights and Western values. The main conservative party Homeland Union — Lithuanian Christian Democrats aimed to instrumentalize geopolitical insecurity for its own domestic popularity — and claimed to be the only force able to ensure stability. However, this election strategy failed, forcing its main leader Gabrielius Landsbergis, who was also foreign minister, to announce his resignation.

In this election campaign, the center-left LSDP instead avoided large geopolitical questions, focusing on more everyday issues such as access to school, hospitals, or a fair pension system. Over recent years, Lithuania had one of the highest inflation rates in Europe, and this surely impacted voter choices. One reason was that the previous government liberalized the energy sector in favor of private firms; and while it promised lower electricity bills, both the Russian war in Ukraine and speculation by energy companies pushed up prices.

The LSDP managed to rally this discontent with a more “social” message. It also promised a change of political culture compared to the last government, widely criticized for its arrogance. Still, the LSDP chairperson Vilija Blinkevičiūtė, who had promised to head the government if her party won the elections, shortly after the vote announced that “for health reasons” she would keep a (better-paid) position in the European Union parliament.

Besides these two major parties, a third player emerged during the elections. A long-standing parliamentarian, but also a sort of Lithuanian Donald Trump, Remigijus Žemaitaitis created a new political party called “Nemunas Dawn” that took third place. As an MP, he became famous for antisemitic statements and a trial initiated by the conservative party for incitement against Jews. Žemaitaitis used this attention to brand himself as an antiestablishment figure. There are many questions about this party’s true aims — it publicized only two pages of its political program, and its campaign was financed by opaque individual sources.

The bulk of LSDP support comes from rural areas and the older generations, whereas it has usually failed to mobilize a progressive vote in the cities. Yet this social democratic party has now achieved its best results any time since 2000 — and imposed defeat on conservatives even in their previous stronghold, Kaunas, the country’s second-largest city. However, often Lithuanians voted “against” rather than “for”: the LSDP took more than half of its seats in the second round of the election, where voters had to choose between two finalists in each constituency.

Conversely, those parties that aimed to mobilize the urban population for progressive ideas did not reach the parliamentary threshold. The Lithuanian Green Party, which incorporated some Lithuanian left-wing activists (including the author of this text), advocated for a feminist Green New Deal program. However, it received only 1.7 percent support nationally. On the other hand, the liberal Freedom Party, which had in the last election in 2020 promised the right to same-sex civil partnerships and decriminalization of marijuana and then entered government, did not deliver any of its promises and paid dearly. None of its eleven MPs was returned to parliament.

What Next?

Two weeks after the result, a new ruling coalition has now been made between three parties — LSDP, the Lithuanian Union of Democrats, and Nemunas Dawn. It is a rather odd coalition that might face serious problems of cooperation.

While LSDP and Lithuanian Democrats competed for similar voters and have a similar center-left ideology, Nemunas Dawn is considered a Trojan horse in the parliament, gathering all the votes that would never vote for the “systemic” parties such as the LSDP, conservatives, or liberals. Before the election, all the major parties promised not to go into coalition with Nemunas Dawn — but LSDP has now broken this promise.

While conservatives are trying to raise a huge scandal over this, in reality there was not much of an alternative. Two other potential partners could have been liberals or the Farmers and Greens party. However, the liberals rejected the offer to join the coalition, while the Farmer-Green leader — one of the country’s biggest agricultural landowners, Ramūnas Karbauskis — was rejected as a possible coalition partner by both the Lithuanian Democrats and Nemunas Dawn, either because of his public insinuations against them or due to his attempts to steal MPs from other parties.

Nemunas Dawn will surely be a difficult partner for the LSDP. This is not only because of its leader and accusations about antisemitism, but also because this party is an ad hoc election project built on a diffuse antiestablishment sentiment. It has few experienced politicians and has elected a long list of fresh faces who have no record in any kind of administration.

All this points either to this party disbanding in the next few years (as many other recently emerging parties have done), or its switching to opposition at some point, which may well give it a higher chance of staying in parliament than running the state administration would do. LSDP leaders apparently place their hopes on the first option. However, the conservatives will be sure to make Nemunas Dawn the center of attention, dragging LSDP and the whole coalition into internal fighting.

So what is the government’s actual program? The coalition agreement does promise a positive change for social policies — to improve public services and to create more incentives for unions and NGOs. On the economy, it promises to introduce progressive taxation, develop a national bank, and help local industry to get back on its feet. These are fair and important measures, as Lithuania is currently fully dependent on Scandinavian financial banks, and its tax system is skewed against social redistribution. For example, the income tax for workers is 20 percent while the dividends from business are taxed only at 15 percent.

The next minister for Social Security and Labor Affairs will be the former trade union representative Inga Ruginienė. She was one of the most popular faces in the media, representing an alternative to business lobby groups on the questions of economy and social affairs. For her term, the government will face questions such as implementing the EU-level Platform Workers’ directive (a broad orientation, if not a law, to recognize these workers as more than self-employees) as well as long-standing issues around the strict regulation of strikes. There are thus some hopes that this may offer a chance to win back some of the needed freedoms and guarantees for the labor movement.

However, Ruginienė will have to overcome the LSDP’s inertia — and its long history of supporting business rather than workers. It was, after all, this same party that pushed a new labor code in 2016, strongly opposed by the unions as it reduced compensation for workers and extended flexible working time. Still, there has been some change. In 2017, the party suffered a crisis and some of the most regressive leaders left its ranks. Gintautas Paluckas took the lead in reforming the party into a more ideologically coherent “European socialist” direction. However, this faced inner resistance from more rural elements, and in the end Paluckas resigned as party leader, with his place taken by the more centrist Vilija Blinkevičiūtė, whose popularity among the older generation helped LSDP to regain votes. Yet today, Paluckas is expected to become prime minister, reflecting the seesawing balance within the party.

Civil rights are an especially ambivalent topic for the next coalition. Over the last four years, Lithuanian politics has been divided over the question of same-sex partnerships (the state does not recognize gay marriage or civil unions). Right-wingers together with Christian groups campaigned for “protection of family values” against “gender ideology.” Meanwhile liberal and left-wing movements aimed to push a same-sex civil-partnership law. At crucial moments, LSDP members have split on voting in favor of the LGBTQ community, and no doubt the Nemunas Dawn party will not miss a chance to lay claim to “family values.” In the new coalition, this party will take hold of the Justice Ministry, meaning that no justice can be expected for LGBTQ people. Moreover, some of the ministerial decrees won by the trans community allowing easier procedures for gender reassignment will now be in danger.

In terms of Lithuania’s geopolitical orientation, support for Ukraine will continue to be a crucial question for national security. All the major parties have an agreement to increase the defense budget, which currently stands above 3 percent of GDP. In this campaign, there were some parties that tried to voice a more pro-Kremlin “antiwar” position, calling for an end to Lithuanian support for the Ukrainian resistance, but they were marginal and did not gather enough votes to pass the parliamentary threshold. Even Nemunas Dawn agreed that the defense budget has to be increased — which raises a question of how much of an antiestablishment force it is. Some suspect that this party is little more than a project of conservatives to create a controlled opposition and marginalize all other antiestablishment voices.

What is new is that the LSDP-led government seems likely to take a rather softer line on relations with China than its predecessor, which had branded its foreign policy as based on “moral values” rather than economic pragmatism. A considerable dispute erupted in 2021 when Lithuania’s government agreed to open an office on its territory representing Taiwan. This conflicted with the Communist Party of China’s policy of allowing only “Chinese Taipei” as a name for Taiwan’s institutions (indicating that it is not an independent country, but just a region of China). This decision was met with Chinese condemnation and even economic sanctions on Lithuania, albeit with limited effect. The US government and European Parliament backed Lithuania in words, but took no similar action and left the Baltic state to fight for its own moral high ground.

It is worth adding that the foreign policy based on so-called moral virtues is more a communication strategy than any kind of coherent agenda for defending international law. At the United Nations, Lithuania has never expressed concerns over the death toll in Gaza and has in fact repeatedly voted against any recognition of Palestine. Lithuanian governments — right, left, or center — have never raised an eyebrow over Israel’s actions in Palestine. Neither does the incoming coalition suggest any greater sympathy for Palestinians.

International Picture

With the reelection of Trump and ever more EU countries turning to the right, Lithuania is one of the few exceptions where a center-left party has managed to turn the tide. Yet the context of international instability is sure to push attention toward increasing military spending rather than investing in new social policies. And if there isn’t any change of social and economic agenda, the Right will surely not miss the chance to blame left-wingers, migrants, and LGBTQ people for the ongoing crisis.

For now, the question is whether the Social Democrats will prove to be different — and try to deliver the change that they promised. On November 14, the new parliament will start its work, and it will soon become clear whether the LSDP really does plan to change things.