It is unlikely that the other major parties will be prepared to accommodate the Russian party
By R.M-H. | RIGA
HARMONY, a centre-left party, which draws most of its support from Latvia's Russians, won more votes than any other party in Latvia’s parliamentary elections on Saturday. Yet Harmony is far from victorious: the Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, has 100 seats and Harmony won 24, well short of a majority. It beat the incumbent Unity party, led by Laimdota Straujuma (pictured), by just one seat.
Latvia's main parties now have a week to broker deals and build a ruling coalition. Nils Usakovs, the young leader of Harmony and the mayor of Riga, claims his party, which has ties with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia, deserves the first shot at forming a government. And according to Janis Urbanovics, Harmony’s leader in the Saeima, Harmony is even prepared to end its association with United Russia. This would be a big step away from its roots as a party in favour of closer links with Moscow.
Even so, it is unlikely that the other major parties will be prepared to accommodate Harmony. All Latvian speaking, they have shown strong reluctance to entering into any form of coalition with Harmony in the past. In 2011, after the last elections, Harmony gained even more votes. But the party was relegated to the opposition by a broad coalition of Latvian parties.
“Harmony joining any ruling coalition would be breaking two taboos at once,” says Licia Cianetti, a researcher at UCL’s Centre for East European Studies. “It is Russian speaking and it is a social democratic party.” Both would be a first for post-Soviet Latvia. And the repercussions of the Ukraine crisis have only strengthened the distaste for Harmony of other parties. “None of the major parties have a strict ideology,” explains Juris Puce, the director general of a new party that did not get any seats. “Our political system focusses on the ethnic and linguistic divide above all else.”
This has characterised much of the election campaign, conflated with worries about a Russian threat after Russia's annexation of Crimea earlier this year. The recent visit of Barack Obama, the American president, to the Baltic states in September may have allayed some fears in the region. And Mr Obama’s vow that “The defence of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius,” is “just as important” as that of “Berlin and Paris and London”, was well received. Even so, Latvia’s security was the big theme in the election campaign.
In all likelihood Harmony will remain guilty by association with Russia and will have to remain in opposition. The result might have been different if Latvia's 300, 000 "non-citizens" had been granted the vote. The dwindling community of non-citizens of Soviet-era migrants are offered Latvian citizenship if they learn Latvian and take a history test. But many never bothered to become Latvian citizens and they make up an estimated 13% of the electorate.
Yet it is doubtful whether the non-citizens would have actually made much use of the right to vote. In the region of Latgale, which has a majority Russian population, only 48% of voters went to the polls. “Minority parties cannot do anything. That was the design. It’s not fair, of course,” says Pavel Andreev, a young Russian speaker from Riga, who is currently looking for a job. “I skipped several elections because I did not feel it would change anything.”
