Russian-leaning party makes gains in Latvian election

The pro-Western ruling coalition in the small Baltic country of Latvia staved off a serious challenge by a Russian-leaning party in parliamentary elections Saturday, but the party’s gains shook a nation still haunted by Soviet purges and executions.

The Harmony Center, which was formed five years ago to represent the Russian-speaking minority in Latvia, had tried to capitalize on disenchantment with the country’s membership in the European Union. Latvia has been particularly hard hit by the continent’s economic crisis.

With vote-counting nearly completed, the left-leaning Harmony Center had won almost 25% in Saturday’s polls and finished second after the center-right bloc led by Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis.

Although Dombrovskis is expected to be able to cobble together a majority in Parliament and form a new government, the results are a huge gain for the Harmony Center, which has gone from 18 seats to almost a third of the 100-seat Parliament.

“Voters are now looking to our side because we stand for ending this division of our society into two separate ethnic camps which traditionally mistrust each other and hold different views on everything from politics to culture and even past history,” Harmony leader Janis Urbanovics said in a phone interview Saturday.

In 50 years under Soviet rule, thousands of ethnic Latvians were purged, executed and sent to Siberian labor camps and exile areas. Several hundred thousand Russians were moved to settle in the Baltics to build heavy industry and new economic, cultural and political infrastructure. Today, Russian-speakers make up about 30% of the country’s 2.2-million population.

After Latvia and two other Baltic republics broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991, the memories were so painful that the first steps Latvia as an independent state took were to seek reintegration into Western Europe and to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, both goals successfully accomplished. Those who couldn’t prove that they had lived in Latvia before the Soviet annexation were made noncitizens and were subjected to what many Russians still view as a humiliating procedure of passing a Latvian-language exam to be granted citizenship.

Although the Harmony Center made gains by consolidating Russian-speaking groups in one bloc, it also drew support from those stunned by the country’s economic troubles. The government had to cut social spending and salaries of state employees, raise taxes and agree to a bailout by the EU and International Monetary Fund. Unemployment has soared to 20%.

For some Latvians, however, the surge by Harmony Center is a nightmare come true.

“It is simply a creeping Russian revenge,” Armands Tsepulis, an ethnic Latvian, said in a phone interview. “Russia never dropped its plans to get us back, and I can see it trying to do it by hook or by crook.”

sergei.loiko@latimes.com