Pro-Secession Candidates Lead in Latvia Vote

Estonians and Latvians cast ballots in their Soviet republics’ first multi-party parliamentary elections Sunday, with nationalists predicting both victory and a slower approach to independence than that seized by the neighboring Baltic breakaway state of Lithuania a week ago.

Unofficial returns from Latvia, gathered by the grass-roots People’s Front, showed pro-secession candidates apparently on their way to an impressive victory. Early results showed they had taken at least 109 seats to at least 29 for anti-independence campaigners, according to Anda Anspoka, spokeswoman for the Front.

But Anspoka said it was too early to declare victory since the group needs a two-thirds majority in the 201-seat legislature, or 134 seats, to implement its independence plan.

No early returns from Estonia were immediately available.

In Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, about 35,000 people led by Communists still loyal to Moscow rallied outside a sports complex against the week-old independence declaration, with some protesters carrying signs reading “We Don’t Want to Live in a Bourgeois Lithuania.”

V. Lazutka, a party secretary, told state-run Soviet television, “We view the events here as a coup that liquidated the constitution.”

The bold action by Lithuania’s legislature was the first crack in the theoretically voluntary union of 15 sovereign Soviet republics and may spark President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s gravest domestic cri sis. On Sunday, Gorbachev denounced the act as a “wrongful decision” but did not say what, if anything, the Kremlin would do to reverse it.

“Something was decided overnight, in the heat of the moment,” Gorbachev told reporters after voting in local and parliamentary runoff elections held in Moscow and much of Russia. “Nevertheless, we shall carry on the dialogue.”

Gorbachev denied that a three-day limit given Lithuanian leaders to answer the Soviet Parliament’s charge that their March 11 proclamation was illegal constituted an ultimatum.

“I think we shall receive a reply from the authorities of present-day Lithuania and, depending on it, everything else will become clear too,” said Gorbachev. Without elaborating, he added: “The character and content of a reply will determine our subsequent steps.”

The Lithuanian example was on the minds of many voters in the neighboring Soviet republics of Estonia and Latvia as they cast ballots in elections for republican parliaments. All three Baltic states became independent after World War I but were forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under a secret agreement between Josef Stalin’s regime and Nazi Germany.

“The Lithuanians have shown us how it can be done,” Sarmite Elerte, chief of the information center of the pro-independence Latvian People’s Front, said by telephone from her republic’s capital of Riga. But she said there also had been a negative effect on non-Latvian residents “who fear a similar turn of events here.”

Since Lithuania’s breakaway move, ethnic Russians in Latvia are in “an alert mode,” Igor V. Lopatin, chairman of the Russian-led Interfront group, said from Riga. “People feel a threat, and activity in the elections is a natural response. Lithuania has served as a catalyst for the Russians in Latvia.”

Non-Latvians are a force to be reckoned with since Latvians make up only 54% of the republic’s population of 2.7 million. To elect 201 members of Latvia’s Parliament, voters chose from among 384 candidates, of whom 187 were endorsed by the People’s Front, including Valdis Steins, leader of the republic’s Social Democrats, and the chiefs of the environmentalist Greens and the Liberal Party.

Janis Vagris, the republic’s Communist Party chief, sat out the elections, a pointed contrast with past practice, when the party could expect automatic voter approval for the sole nominee it proposed for each seat. However, 70% of the candidates were members of the Communist Party, and the two top government leaders, President Anatoly Gorbunov and Prime Minister Edvin-Vilnis Bresis, ran unopposed.

Elerte said the People’s Front sought to elect at least two-thirds of the membership of the Latvian Parliament to have the majority required to alter the republic’s constitution and restore independence. But she predicted that candidates endorsed by the grass-roots group would win little more than half the seats Sunday, making swift action impossible.

“A proclamation of independence, however, is not in doubt,” Elerte said. “It will happen. We just don’t know when this will be--in the legislature we are electing now, or in the one after that.”

In Estonia, 30 parties and political organizations fielded 392 candidates for 100 seats in the republic’s legislature, including at least three groups calling themselves Social Democrats and a separate Green Party, Green Movement and Green Regiment. That seeming variety was deceptive, said Estonian Radio commentator Harri Tiido: “All Estonian parties as a matter of fact have quite similar platforms--the main goal is an independent Estonia.”

Among the best known candidates were Communist Party leader Vaino Vyalyas, President Arnold Ruutel and People’s Front leaders Marju Lauristin and Edgar Savisaar. Only about one-quarter of the total were Communists, and Tiido stressed that “even those Estonian Communists who are running support an independent Estonia.”

Ethnic Estonians, however, make up only about two-thirds of their homeland’s population of 1.6 million people, and Russians and other non-Estonians running in enclaves in the republic’s northeast, where they are in the majority, were expected to win election to Parliament easily.

Where the Estonians part ways with the Lithuanians is over tactics, preferring a more cautious approach. “They declared themselves independent, then asked to begin negotiations (with Moscow),” commented Tiido. “We Estonians want to start negotiations, then think about declaring independence.”

Estonia has also created an institution without parallel in Lithuania: a Congress representing people living in the small Baltic homeland at the time of the 1940 Soviet takeover and their descendants.

That body, which met for the first time this month, is considered the legal heir of the Estonian state, while the Parliament is regarded as a creation of the occupation, Tiido said. However only Parliament’s decisions are likely to have validity in Moscow’s eyes, he admitted, so ideally, the institutions will join in pursuing a restoration of Estonian independence.

Runoff elections were also held in the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, the three republics that make up 80% of Soviet territory and are home to two-thirds of its 290 million people. The first round of elections March 4 left many local and parliamentary posts unfilled, including 948 of the 1,068 seats in the newly created Russian Congress of People’s Deputies and 352 spots in the 450-seat Ukrainian legislature.

Officials said the problem was the large number of candidates who split votes among them, including more than 20 in some districts of the Russian Federation. But the chief problem Sunday appeared to be voter indifference.

Soviet television’s evening news program Vremya, quoting the Central Elections Commission, said voter turnout in the Slavic republics was between 40% and 50%. By Soviet law, if less than half the voters take part, then new elections must be held.