Columns

Eric Freedman

Democratic Politics
in Lithuania

November 18, 2011

Elections take on a different perspective when you’re an outsider looking in.

Although I’m in Lithuania this fall to teach journalism, I don’t feel like an outsider when closely following the never-ending election cycle at home — recall petitions, Republican party strategies to keep the House, special elections, Democratic party strategies to recapture the House, politically motivated redistricting of congressional and legislative lines, speculation about whether four years will be enough for Governor Rick Snyder, which candidates are raising how much campaign cash for 2012 and so forth.

But I am an outsider when I look at elections in Lithuania and its neighbors. Here, I’m an observer with no personal — a/k/a citizen — stake in the results, although my colleagues and students at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas do have such a stake in their own elections and in those of their neighboring countries.

Lithuania will hold its elections for the Seimas — parliament — next October, and voters are likely to need a scorecard to keep track of who’s who and what’s what. Currently, 10 parties have representation in Seimas, with the Homeland Union-Christian Democrats holding the most seats and the Social Democrats in second place. The others are National Resurrection; Order & Justice; Liberal Movement; Labour Party; Liberal & Centre Union; Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania; Peasant Popular Union; and New Union-Social Liberals.

Given the proliferation of parties and the difficulty of securing a Seimas majority, it’s not surprising that the country is governed by a multi-party coalition. To add to the confusion, the popularly elected president, Dalia Grybauskaitė, is an independent, as are several members of the Seimas.

Also not surprising, one major set of issues, as elsewhere across Europe, will involve the faltering economy in the country and across the continent. Those issues include high unemployment, a brain drain of talented young Lithuanians and the question of whether Lithuania should continue its commitment to adopt the euro.

Lithuania is more homogeneous and less diverse than many other European countries. It hasn’t seen the flood of labor immigrants and political refugees from the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans that other European countries have experienced, so immigration isn’t a big controversy here. However, tensions between ethnic Lithuanians (84 percent of the population) and ethnic Poles (6 percent of the population) are a political hot-button issue.

Right now, ethnic Poles are irate about a March 2011 law mandating increased Lithuanian-language coursework in minority-language state-financed schools. That law has further chilled the already cool relations between Poland and Lithuania. Thus, it won’t come as a shock to see candidates of the Electoral Action of Poles campaign on a platform of repealing the new law.

And if recent events are accuate predictors of the future, Lithuanians can expect ad hominem arguments, mudslinging and personal slurs to be part of the campaign rhetoric, as they sadly are in some Michigan campaigns. These excerpts from an April 2011 article in the English-language newspaper Lithuania Tribune, headlined “Lithuania’s Polish leader acts like a child,” are illustrative:

The leader of the Lithuanian Poles, Member of the European Parliament Waldemar Tomaszewski, acts like a capricious child by making provocative remarks, the Lithuanian prime minister said.

Tomaszewski said it is not the Lithuanian Poles but the Lithuanians who live in the Polish minority populated areas in Vilnius region who should integrate into the Polish community. He was commenting on the latest amendments to the Education law and said the Poles have always lived there and it is only the Lithuanians who came there later.

Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius reacted by saying that Tomaszewski’s behavior reminded him of a small child who is constantly complaining to attract attention from his parents.

Meanwhile, politically savvy Lithuanians are reading the tea leaves over other election events among their neighbors.

For example, Belarus voters overwhelmingly “re-elected” their authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, last December. Yet Lukashenko was apparently so disappointed at securing a mere 79.7 percent of the vote that he felt it necessary to reinforce his hard-earned reputation as Europe’s sole remaining autocrat.

After the voting, his police and KGB arrested 7 of the 9 opposition candidates — three of whom were physically assaulted — and more than 600 protestors who somehow suspected the election was rigged. The New York Times quoted this understatement from an election monitor for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: “A positive assessment of these elections is impossible.”

Now the region’s 500-pound gorilla, Russia, is gearing up for its March 2012 presidential “election.” A quick history refresher: Russia’s former president, the authoritarian Vladimir Putin, couldn’t run for a third term in 2008 due to Russia’s inconvenient term limit law. But eager to remain in service to his adoring public, Putin arranged for his protégé — critics say puppet — Dmitry Medvedev to run for the presidency while Putin pulled the strings and served as the prime minister selected by the parliament.

Sound familiar? It’s not quite the same as the tradition among term-limited Michigan legislators of promoting their spouses and children as successors, but the Putin-Medvedev swap-a-roo kept the job in the tag team’s political “family.”

But the will of the people surely cannot be denied, so after the mandatory one-term constitutional hiatus from the presidency, Putin’s legion of fans prestidigitated another swap-a-roo. Their United Russia party, which is expected to overwhelmingly win again in March, nominated Putin for president under an arrangement that will make Medvedev prime minister. Regardless of title, Putin will remain puppetmaster and Medvedev will carry on as puppet.

So maybe 10 parties in parliament isn’t such a bad set-up for Lithuania.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Freedman is associate professor of journalism at Michigan State University and director of Capital News Service. He and Dome columnist Stephen A. Jones are editors of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).