“Empire Strikes Back!” Oligarchs and Values Fatigue in Latvia’s Rejection of the Istanbul Convention

Europe’s political classes were backfooted by Latvia’s Parliament (Saeima) vote to pull out of the Istanbul Convention (IC), the treaty protecting women from violence. They then reset and punted on the IC’s future as several protests in the thousands took to Latvia’s streets. Backstory to the vote for Latvia’s IC exit, however, is less about women’s rights, but insider politics and the decreasing returns on “European Values” for defending the “European Project.” In brief, Latvia’s opposition parties, Latvia First Party, headed by oligarch Ainars Slessers, was previously voted out in 2009, then staged a political return riding our last decade’s global wave of rightwing populism. Then there is the Green & Farmers Party, both rural in character but also led by the flamboyant former oligarch, Aivars Lembergs. Lembergs was briefly jailed in 2021 for corruption, thus relegating him to gray cardinal status in Latvia’s politics thereafter. Lembergs and Slessers are two of the three most powerful oligarchs ever produced by Latvia. This opposition’s third leg comes from the now main party representing Latvia’s Russian speakers, Stability. All three parties are positioning themselves for an allied win eleven months hence in Latvia’s parliament elections. They see an opening in the IC’s language on gender as socially constructed rather than fixed as being alien cultural norms advanced by Brussels and Latvian elites whose lives remain distant from the realities of working people.

Latvia’s liberal parties have defended the Istanbul Convention’s noble goals of protecting women’s safety by wrapping it in the shroud of “European values.” European values have carried the day in endless Latvian political contests the past three decades among Latvians seeing themselves as stalwart allies of Brussels’ European project. Latvia’s rejection of the IC, however, signals a European values fatigue growing within the post-Soviet space.

Latvian, if not Baltic, women have broken many glass ceilings. The EU’s four female prime ministers are in the three Baltic States (Latvia and Lithuania). And, the third Baltic State, Estonia, had a female prime minister (Kaja Kallas) up until last year, when she was kicked upstairs to Brussels to become the EU’s chief foreign affairs representative along with vice-president of the European Commission. Latvian women are some 34% of the members of the parliament, doubling the16% figure of 2016 when they signed the Istanbul Convention. Moreover, Latvia was among the first countries extending the vote to all adult women in 1918. In short, the Baltic States have proven leaders in opening high-level career doors for women.

This is not to say, however, women don’t need protection. Countries marked by significant levels of inequality and poverty serve as incubators for social pathologies, including violence against women, and especially those of the working class. In fact, Latvia has the highest reported rate of “femicide” in all Europe. However, “European values” in the post-Soviet space, to be blunt, often means “not Russian.” Nowhere in the EU does values code to anti-Russian sentiment more than the Baltics. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that lacked the partial autonomy of Cold War Soviet bloc states. Annexed in 1940 by the USSR, Soviet Baltic Republics lacked the limited latitude of freedom from Moscow possessed by communist bloc countries. And of those three Baltic countries, the language of European values resonates most loudly in Latvia, which had the biggest immigration of Russian speakers in the Baltics during the period of Soviet occupation.

Soviet occupation brought a mix of policies. Soviet social supports (childcare, healthcare, education, retirement, etc.) were clearly progressive. Simultaneously, archaic or socially regressive cultural habits persisted behind the “protection” of the Iron Curtain. Economic growth in the early Cold War decade was solid, but stagnation set in by the late 1970s and contraction followed in the 1980s. For those now under 50, memories of “Krievu Laiks,” (“the Russian time” as Latvians reference the Soviet occupation) are linked to stories of older relatives deported to Siberia in the 1940s, Soviet decline in the 1980s, and the trauma of shock therapy transition in the 1990s and up to EU accession in 2004.

Much of Latvia’s younger working-class responded to the 1990s shock therapy and post 2008 financial shock (world’s biggest as percent contraction of GDP) and following “internal devaluation” (austerity) by voting with their feet, as Latvia saw the EU’s biggest emigration by percent of population in the EU space since 1991. Rhetorically, “European values” checked many boxes. For Latvian nationalists, it meant anti-Russian. For young professionals, it meant prospects for social mobility, decent paid work and international travel with NGOs and international companies. For LBTQ+ communities it meant liberation from socially conservative values preserved under Soviet rule, and for which it must be remembered still persisted in the “West” at the point of the Soviet Union’s demise.

For some three decades “European values” successfully carried freight for neoliberals. A combination of nationalists, upwardly mobile professionals and a cultural left delivered sufficient support to keep Latvia’s neoliberals in power. In short, for liberals (cultural, economic and political) European values hold sway and power in Latvia, until they don’t. Latvia’s recent rejection of the Istanbul Convention represents a serious fracture, but not total defeat, of the European values political coalition. But it decidedly represents a weakening of support for a European project generally absent stronger national autonomy and improving conditions for working people.

Latvia’s neoliberals, however, only blame last week’s Istanbul Convention parliament vote loss on, drumroll: Russia. No doubt Kremlin hybrid warriors are pleased with the erosion of support for a united Europe. It would be intellectually lazy, if not strategically misplaced, however, to see erosion of the European values consensus as a production scripted and acted out only by Kremlin marionettes, even if puppeteers are on site tugging (or pushing) on strings.

Three and a half decades of independence have left Latvia’s capital of Riga half prosperous, but plateaued in a “middle income trap.” Outside Riga, much of the rest of the country is some combination of nature preserve and retirement home consequent from three plus decades of emigration and low-birth rates. Moreover, Latvia is a high-cost country where families struggle for lack of adequate kindergartens and other forms of social support. Many Latvians are fatigued by European values rhetoric espoused by neoliberals in suits and fashionable dresses distant from their own daily lived challenged realities. Their ongoing three decades trafficking of a ‘heads I win tails you lose choice’ of ‘it’s either neoliberal Europe or Russia,’ sees diminishing political returns. Moreover, citizens are increasingly weary of a Frankfurt School cultural left politics policymakers pay fealty too without delivering better material living standards for working families. Failing to deliver on the latter, many working people begin turning against the former.

To be fair, a chief defender of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Latvia’s Progressive Party advanced a pro-labor and family agenda paired to promotion of innovation-centered enterprises, combined with culturally LGBTQ+ values. Among their parliament members advancing this more progressive agenda inclusive of the working class, were Kaspars Briskens and Andris Suvajevs. However, in defending the IC, even the Progressive Party defaulted to “European values” rhetoric as their chief line of defense, thus losing resonance with working people.

Many Latvians rightly expected more from independence. Their demands of respect for local culture can be tethered to tolerance if they are not waterboarded with the tired superiority rhetoric of European values. Improved conditions and voice for labor can coexist with tolerance for all. Absent that ear turned toward labor, with language anchored in a discourse of affordability and respect, European values will further lose appeal and oligarch classes (both local and those connected east) will assume more political wins.

Jeffrey Sommers is Professor of Political Economy & Public and Senior Fellow, Institute of World Affairs of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book on the Baltics (with Charles Woolfson), is The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model.

Cosmin Marian is Chair and Professor of the Department of Political Science at Romania’s Babeș-Bolyai University. He works on comparative politics throughout the EU.

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