Public Broadcasting of Latvia:
Central Election Commission chairman Arnis Cimdars announced the official provisional results of Latvia’s 12th Saeima elections Sunday at a press conference in central Riga. After telling journalists that the election had generally run smoothly, Cimdars revealed the results, which showed the opposition Harmony party topping the poll by a narrow margin. Harmony secured 23.13% of the vote ahead of Unity (21.76%), Greens and Farmers Union (19.62%), National Alliance (16.57%), Latvia From the Heart (6.88%) and the Regional Alliance (6.55%). Owing to the complex formulas used to work out the distribution of seats, the Regional Alliance actually won an extra seat from Latvia From the Heart – ironically as a result of its stronger support in Riga. The seats in the 100-member parliament will be distributed in the following manner: Harmony 24 seats; Unity 23; Greens and Farmers 21; National Alliance 17; Regional Alliance 8; Latvia From The Heart 7.
As a practical matter what this means is the governing right-of-center coalition is highly likely to remain in office, but the underlying problem symbolized by the leftist Harmony Center, the leading ‘Russian’ party (which has links to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia) led by Nils Usakovs, the mayor of the Latvian capital, Riga, remains. Don’t focus too much on the left and right: Latvia is a country divided on ethnic lines that count for far more than any ideological division. This time round, Harmony will see its tally of seats in the 100-person legislature fall by seven, and its percentage of the poll has fallen by roughly five percentage points. Interestingly and perhaps encouragingly, it lost ground in Latgale, Latvia’s easternmost region, the part of the country thought to be the most susceptible to any incursions from Moscow’s ‘little green men’.
Despite coming top in the poll (again) Harmony is seen as still too toxic a party for the ‘Latvian’ parties to work with. Anyone wondering why only has to look to memories of the long Soviet occupation and, more recently, the behavior of Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere in the ‘near abroad’.
One reassuring note was the poor performance of the far harder line Latvian Russian Union (1.59 percent), not that this will hold back those in Moscow who wish to meddle further. And will.