Russian language drive crushed in Latvia plebiscite

Campaigners aiming to make Russian the second official language of EU member state Latvia suffered a crushing defeat in a referendum Saturday which spotlighted ethnic divisions in the ex-Soviet republic.

Official figures from four-fifths of the country’s polling stations showed that almost 76 percent of voters had opposed the plan to change the constitution to give Russian equal status with Latvian.

The campaign organised by members of Latvia’s ethnic-Russian minority mustered just under 24 percent of the vote in favour.

Turnout topped 69 percent, one of the highest levels in a vote since Latvia regained its independence in 1991 after five decades of rule by Moscow.

Radical Russian-language activist Vladimirs Lindermans, at the helm of the grouping Native Tongue, played down what had been a widely expected defeat.

“Our main purpose was to start a dialogue and that dialogue has now started,” he told Latvian state channel LTV1.

“It has sometimes been rather emotional and hysterical but even hysteria is better than the silence of the last 20 years,” he said.

“At the moment we have no concrete plans. The referendum is not the end but just the beginning… Of course we will stay within the law, but we will take further action,” he added.

Ethnic Russians, mostly from a Soviet settler community, make up 27 percent of Latvia’s two million people and have pushed to end what they called discrimination by giving their language equal constitutional status with Latvian.

“I voted for, because I hope the government will see there are many people who feel left out — and to say that Russian is not a foreign language in Latvia,” Aleksey Vesyoliy, a ex-international skater who said he was proud to have represented Latvia, told AFP.

But the campaign raised hackles among many majority ethnic-Latvians for whom their language is a symbol of freedom.

After Latvia was seized by the Soviets during World War II, tens of thousands of ethnic Latvians were deported to Siberia and Russian-speakers were sent in, while Russian also dominated Soviet public life.

While Moscow called the vote an internal affair, its past vocal backing for the Russian cause has often sparked Latvian accusations of Kremlin meddling.

“If people really want to speak Russian 24 hours per day there is a great place for them. It is called Russia,” voter Pauls Pukitis told AFP.

Casting his ballot Saturday, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis said voting against the plan meant “strengthening the very foundations of the country” — before fielding questions in both languages.

Aleksejs Loskutovs, an ethnic Russian lawmaker from Dombrovskis’s centre-right Unity party, told AFP: “The main task now is to improve communication with all parts of society”.

Native Tongue forced the referendum by collecting signatures from over 10 percent of voters.

It surfed a wave of disappointment after Harmony Centre, a centre-left party with strong ethnic-Russian backing, topped a snap election but was axed from coalition talks.

Harmony Centre leader Nils Usakovs, Riga’s mayor, had hedged on taking part but finally came out in favour.

“I voted because there are many problems between the linguistic minority and the state — not between the minority and the majority, which is an important difference,” he told AFP.

“Lots of people voting today don’t believe they really need a second state language. In general they want to send a message saying that these problems do exist,” he said.

An issue that angers Russian campaigners is that the settler community’s members did not get Latvian passports automatically after independence, but instead have had to pass Latvian tests.

Otherwise they risk remaining stateless, and 290,000 people fall into that bracket, albeit down from 500,000 a decade ago, while 270,000 hold Latvian citizenship.