VILNIUS, Oct 1 (Portal) – Latvians are set to vote in Saturday’s general election, with polls predicting Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins’ centre-right New Unity party to win the most votes, allowing him to expand his coalition with of the conservative National Alliance to continue.
A victory for Karins could widen the growing rift between Latvia’s Latvian majority and Russian-speaking minority over their place in society.
Karins, the first Latvian leader to serve a full four-year term, is benefiting from pushing the country’s combative stance on Russia amid widespread national anger over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The election campaign was dominated by issues of national identity and security concerns, while pressing issues such as rising energy costs and high inflation were largely sidelined.
Karins told Portal on Tuesday he believes the war in Ukraine has consolidated his NATO and EU nation of 1.9 million and said that if re-elected he would integrate the Russian minority – a quarter of the population by making the country educate its children in Latvian.
“We are fully focused on youth to ensure that whatever the language spoken at home, the child grows up with all the benefits of knowing our language and culture,” he said.
Before Moscow invaded Ukraine on February 24 in what it calls a “military special operation,” tens of thousands of Russian speakers in Latvia would gather around a monument in Riga every May 9 to commemorate the Soviet victory in World War II.
Their gatherings were banned after the invasion and the 84-meter-tall building in the center of the capital was bulldozed by orders of the government, which is dominated by ethnic Latvians and would rather bury memories of belonging to the former Soviet Union until 1991.
Popular TV shows from Russia have been banned and the state language authority has proposed renaming a central street in Riga to commemorate Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Karins’ government has presented plans to switch all education to Latvian and to rapidly phase out education in Russian.
The Harmonie social democratic party, traditionally supported by Latvia’s Russian-speaking minority, won 19.8% of the vote in the 2018 elections and became the largest opposition party in parliament. However, the latest poll shows that Harmony has 7.3% support.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)