Elections to the Seimas of Latvia: main themes of the campaign and main political forces

Author, Anastasia Efremova

Place of work, BBC Russian Service

Published 5 minutes ago

Reading time: 16 min

Elections to the Seimas are being held in Latvia, six months after the government crisis, the reason for which was the fall of a drone in the country. Three important issues that divide Latvian society and will influence the election results are: the national-language issue, the attitude towards the war in Ukraine and the attitude towards the “liberal agenda” (including the rights of the LGBT community).

The BBC looked into what political forces are going to these elections - and what they offer the voter.

Election procedure

14 party lists are taking part in the elections to the Seimas, which will compete for 100 seats in parliament. Lists that receive more than 5% of the votes pass to the Seimas. Voting will take place on Saturday from 8 am to 8 pm local time, with vote counting beginning immediately after the polling stations close. They will count manually, they will also vote in the traditional way; there is no electronic voting in Latvia.

According to the CEC, in 2026, 1,553,583 Latvian citizens will have the right to vote. In Latvia - as in Estonia - there is a separate category of non-citizens who do not have the right to vote. These are people from other republics of the former USSR (primarily from the RSFSR), who came to Latvia after 1940, and their descendants. Most of them have the right to take the exam and obtain Latvian citizenship, and the number of non-citizens has decreased several times compared to the first years of independence. According to the Central Statistical Office, at the beginning of 2026 there were almost 160 thousand non-citizens in Latvia, half of them lived in Riga.

In the entire history of Latvian independence, not a single party has received more than 35% of the votes and, accordingly, has not received an absolute majority, so the parties have to come to an agreement among themselves and create a ruling coalition. Parties that have agreed on a coalition share ministerial portfolios and form a government. The winner of the vote does not necessarily become the prime minister's party: it depends, firstly, on the decision of the president - he instructs to form a coalition, and secondly, on the negotiating capacity of the party to which this was entrusted: it may not cope with the task.

For example, according to the results of the 2018 elections, the government was headed by New Unity, which received only 6.7% of the votes. Negotiations on the formation of a coalition lasted more than 100 days. In the elections, the Harmony party took first place (19.8%), but other political forces declared that they would not cooperate with it. Therefore, then-president Raimonds Vējonis entrusted the formation of a coalition first to the candidate for prime minister from the New Conservative Party, then to the candidate from the KPV LV party (both parties received about 14%), but their negotiations reached a dead end, and only Krišjānis Kariņš from New Unity eventually managed to assemble a coalition of five parties.

What do voters care about?

Latvian society is divided by three important issues: the national language issue, the attitude towards the war in Ukraine and the attitude towards the “liberal agenda” (including the rights of the LGBT community).

More than a third of the country is Russian-speaking, and there are parties that traditionally focus on either the Latvian or Russian-speaking electorate. “Ethnic voting” has existed almost since the restoration of independence in 1991. Attitudes to the war in Ukraine partly overlap with the national-linguistic issue, but not always: as a study conducted in 2025 showed, 12% of Latvian Russian speakers openly support Russia, 18% support Ukraine, and 55% do not support either side. Of the parties working primarily for the Russian-speaking electorate, only Harmony condemned the Russian invasion, which ultimately failed to enter the Seimas in 2022.

A striking example of how the country is divided by attitudes towards “traditional” and “non-traditional” values ​​is the story of the Istanbul Convention against Domestic Violence and Violence against Women. The main complaint of opponents of the convention is that its text includes the concepts of “social sex” (“gender”) and “gender characteristic”. Conservative opponents of the convention from a variety of parties saw this as a threat to family values ​​and the promotion of an LGBT agenda.

In November 2023, the Seimas decided to ratify the convention, and in October 2025, to withdraw from it. The initiator of the denunciation was the conservative party “Latvia First”, and the denunciation became possible thanks to the position of the “Union of Greens and Peasants”, which decided to refuse to support the convention against the backdrop of a drop in its rating.

At least 10 thousand people came out to the rally in defense of the convention, and politicians from the ruling coalition took part in the protest and actively called for it. President Edgar Rinkevich refused to sign the denunciation bill and returned it to the Sejm for reconsideration, proposing to postpone the issue for a year. A new decision on the Istanbul Convention will be taken by the new, 15th Seimas.

Another important issue is immigration control. Recently, the number of immigrants from India, Uzbekistan and other “third countries” - that is, states that are not members of the EU - has been growing in Latvia. First of all, these are foreign students. According to the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs at the beginning of July, 6,122 citizens of India and 5,120 citizens of Uzbekistan had valid temporary residence permits in Latvia, and 216 and 329 had permanent residence permits, respectively. The topic of migrants also appeared in the election rhetoric: more conservative parties promise to tighten migration policy.

There is a fairly large gap between rich and poor in Latvia: according to a recent study, two-thirds of families are struggling to make ends meet. Therefore, many of the parties’ election promises are related to social policy: raising benefits, lowering taxes, making medicine more accessible.

"Bulldozer", ministers and "young Latvians". Which parties are participating in the elections and what do they offer?

According to a September survey by the marketing research agency Latvijas fakti, 12.9% of respondents do not intend to go to the polls, and 20% have not yet decided who to vote for.

Despite the fact that the votes of undecided voters can be decisive, we can already conclude that seven parties have a chance of passing the five percent threshold. More precisely, party lists: some parties go to elections in alliance with others, and the lists may contain candidates who are not members of a particular party, but are running for it.

"New Unity". Centrists, oriented towards the European Union and European values. Relies on a prosperous middle class, officials, educated citizens. According to a recent survey by the SKDS research center, the New Unity electorate least of all wants any changes in the country.

The “New Unity” association includes the “Unity” party and several regional parties. Unity emerged in 2011 from the merger of three other parties, the most significant of which was New Time, which won the elections in 2002. Many New Unity politicians held significant positions back in the 2000s; one example is Edgars Rinkevich, the current president of Latvia.

For a long time it was the prime minister's party. Shortly before the elections, New Unity lost the prime minister's chair and part of the ministerial portfolios. This happened after the government of Evika Silini collapsed due to Ukrainian drones flying into the country.

In the spring of 2026, the coalition collapsed due to New Unity falling out with the Progressives, who were often described as New Unity's junior coalition partners. It is a social democratic left-liberal party, drawing on the votes of young people, hipsters, supporters of the Green Deal, feminism and LGBT rights. The topics that “Progressives” most often touch on on social networks (where they are quite active), according to FB Skapis, are education, environmental protection, corruption, immigration (in defense of migrants’ rights) and domestic violence.

The mayor of Riga, Viesturs Kleinbergs, belongs to the “Progressive” party, and at the local government level the party actively advocates for the development of cycling and reducing the number of cars in the city.

As a result of the 2022 elections, they managed to get into the Seimas for the first time, and in 2023 enter the ruling coalition. In 2026, drones began to fly into Latvia regularly. After one of the incidents, Prime Minister Evika Silina dismissed Defense Minister Andris Spruds (a member of the Progressives) because, in her opinion, he did not react to the external threat. The prime minister nominated non-party career military man Raivis Melnis to his post.

The “Progressives” considered this a violation of the coalition agreement and announced that they would support the vote of no confidence in Silina initiated by the opposition. Silinya resigned without waiting for a vote, the coalition disintegrated, and as a result of new negotiations, the “Progressives” did not enter the coalition, but the “New Unity” did, although they lost the prime minister’s chair.

Progressive supporters, according to the SKDS poll, do not particularly want change. There is also a correlation with age: as the same survey showed, Latvians aged 18-24, 25-35 and 65-74 years least want change.

The new ruling coalition in 2026 was headed by the moderate-conservative “United List”, created in 2022 from three parties: the Association of Regions of Latvia, the Latvian Green Party and the Liepaja Party. This alliance was joined by many politicians from the Union of Greens and Peasants, tired of their prolonged stay in the opposition. Despite the fact that the Joint List has been in power for more than six months, the SKDS poll found that its supporters are among the most eager for change.

Andris Kulbergs, the current Prime Minister of Latvia and the leader of the list, comes from an entrepreneurial background. He positions himself as a pragmatist and a “problem solver” and in his rhetoric emphasizes the need to develop the economy and entrepreneurship, and talks about the need to attract foreign investment. He gained popularity by being active on social media and debating in the Seimas, where he, among other things, headed the parliamentary commission investigating violations during the construction of the Rail Baltica railway megaproject.

The main task in the election program is to ensure the triple security of Latvia - military, economic and civil.

The politician criticizes the European Green Deal, while, as the LSM portal notes, he was the only MP from his list to speak out in support of same-sex marriage.

The National Union is a right-wing national-conservative bloc, which can be called one of the oldest political forces in modern Latvia. The National Bloc stands for traditional values, limiting immigration to Latvia and strengthening the position of the Latvian language, which in practice means limiting the use of Russian and the desire to assimilate local Russian speakers, who make up more than a third of the country's population. Local Russian speakers, in turn, often vote according to the principle “if only not for the National Bloc.”

The national association usually does not occupy a leading position, but always enters the Seimas and is most often included in the ruling coalition. It was part of the ruling coalition after the 2022 Seimas elections, along with the “New Unity” and the “United List”. But in 2023, the coalition collapsed: the partners could not agree on a single candidate for the presidency, the National Rally and the Joint List went into opposition.

Returning to the coalition after the fall of the Silini government in 2026, the National Rally received four ministries: interior, education, culture and energy.

During this short time, the ministers managed to make several high-profile decisions. Thus, the Minister of Culture Naouris Puntulis banned the Russian language in the communications of institutions under his jurisdiction, including in advertising and on social networks. The most famous case is associated with the Riga Russian Theater named after Mikhail Chekhov. According to the order of the ministry, from now on any posters and posts of the theater on social networks could only be in the state language; this did not apply to the content of the productions themselves. The theater, as a sign of protest, began to make bilingual posters, the Russian text on which was smeared or covered with green.

The Minister of Internal Affairs Janis Dombrava showed the greatest activity, launching a campaign to combat immigrants. He began conducting document checks and insisted on tightening immigration laws. He did not ignore the language issue, obliging employees of subordinate institutions to communicate only in Latvian at work (the rule does not apply to emergency cases, for example, calling the police or firefighters).

However, Dombrava displeased the head of government after he wrote a letter to his Spanish colleagues about the crisis in Ceuta (where tens of thousands of migrants briefly escaped from Morocco) and gave them advice on how to combat immigration. Spain was surprised by the “arrogant tone” of the letter, and Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs said that from now on any appeals to foreign countries must be coordinated with the Latvian Foreign Ministry.

Another notable figure on the National Association’s list is the former head of the National Council for Electronic Media, Ivars Abolins. The conclusion of this department became the reason for the ban on broadcasting of the Dozhd TV channel in Latvia*. Abolins himself promises to close private radio stations broadcasting in Russian.

The Union of Greens and Peasants (UZK) is the fourth party currently included in the ruling coalition. The co-founder of the NWK was the Latvian Green Party, which left the alliance before the elections to the 14th Saeima and entered the “Joint List”, so now only the name remains of the “greens” in the NWK. SZK is not associated with the environmental agenda. This social-conservative association, its member Peasant Union of Latvia, has existed since 1990 and considers itself the successor to the Latvian Peasant Union, which existed during the first period of independence.

The party focuses on rural residents, small and medium-sized businesses and voters with low incomes. The leader of the party, Minister of Economy Viktor Valainis, was one of the initiators of reducing VAT on basic food products.

In 2023, the NWC managed to return to the coalition. The condition for entering a coalition with more liberal partners was support for the civil partnership bill and ratification of the Istanbul Convention against Domestic Violence. The NWC fulfilled these conditions, but began to lose support from a more conservative audience and, at the end of 2025, consolidated with the opposition that opposed the convention.

The conservative Latvia First party, currently in opposition, is often referred to simply as “Šlesers' party.” Formally, this is a new party, but its leader Ainars Slesers has been a prominent figure in politics since the late 1990s. The Latvian millionaire managed to be the Minister of Economy