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Russian-speaking Latvians who back Ukraine and value their language are heading into an election without an obvious political home

Source: Meduza

Latvia will elect its 15th Saeima, or parliament, on October 3. September polls suggest seven political groups have a chance of winning seats. Two of them — the Sovereign Power / Young Latvians alliance and Latvia First — are competing vigorously to win over voters who once supported the “Russian” parties. Their rivalry is one of the campaign’s central stories: almost 35% of Latvian citizens speak Russian at home. Polls also suggest that the traditional “Russian” parties, especially Harmony Center, remain below the 5% threshold. Writing for Meduza, Sergejs Potapkins, a political scientist and researcher at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, traces the complicated history of Latvia’s parties that have sought to represent Russian speakers.

Different views, shared interests

The history of the party model relying primarily on Russian votes began long before Harmony. After Latvia regained independence in 1991, disputes over citizenship, the Russian language, and the Soviet past became the main dividing lines between parties.

The groups described as “Russian” primarily represented Russian speakers, although their leaders and voters came from many different ethnic backgrounds. Only Latvian citizens had the right to vote in parliamentary and local elections. The Russian parties also defended noncitizens, who could not themselves vote for them.

Two distinct strands of Russian-speaking politics were already taking shape in the fifth Saeima, elected in 1993. Some groups sought from the outset to work within the restored Latvian state: the Harmony for Latvia, Revival for the Economy electoral list won 13 of the 100 seats. Its leader was Jānis Jurkāns, a Popular Front activist and independent Latvia’s first foreign minister. The other strand grew out of political resistance to the restoration of Latvian statehood. Equal Rights, which won seven seats, emerged from a Supreme Council faction of the same name, most of whose members had opposed the restoration of Latvia’s independence.

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From the outset, Russian-speaking political representation brought together people who had only recently stood on opposite sides of the central conflict over leaving the USSR and restoring independence.

These two visions of the future of Russians in Latvia led to fragmentation in the 1995 elections for the sixth Saeima. Jurkāns’ National Harmony Party, formed a year earlier from the former alliance, argued for integrating Russian speakers. The Socialist Party’s electoral list, which included Equal Rights, presented itself as their defender and appealed to voters by defining itself in opposition to the state. Together, the parties won 11 seats, down from 20. Their position had weakened, but continuing public disputes over citizenship and language only increased demand for political representation for Russian speakers.

The response was the For Human Rights in a United Latvia alliance, known by its Russian acronym, ZaPChEL. Ahead of the 1998 elections for the seventh Saeima, the National Harmony Party, Equal Rights, and the socialists formed its core. The small Russian Party also joined. Registration problems forced the bloc to run under the National Harmony Party’s name; it won 16 seats. ZaPChEL managed to unite liberal centrists with socialists: Russian speakers’ rights proved more important than ideological differences.

Victories without results

In the elections for the eighth Saeima, ZaPChEL finished second and won 25 seats, just one fewer than the winner. That success sharpened disagreements over whether it was possible to form a government with Alfrēds Rubiks’ socialists and Tatjana Ždanoka’s Equal Rights, which had once opposed the restoration of independence. Ethnic Latvian parties still considered ZaPChEL an unacceptable partner and refused to form a coalition with it. As a result, the National Harmony Party left ZaPChEL in 2003.

In 2005, the party became a founding member of the Harmony Center alliance. In 2010, it joined New Center and the Social Democratic Party to form Harmony. ZaPChEL later also became a single party and renamed itself the Latvian Russian Union in 2014.

Harmony inherited many of ZaPChEL’s members and much of its experience. It brought the broad alliance’s political base back together while presenting a more moderate image. It sought to move beyond being an ethnic party and become a broader social democratic party capable of forming a governing coalition and finding common ground with the ethnic Latvian majority. The Latvian Russian Union, by contrast, remained focused on defending minorities, emphasizing language, schools, noncitizens, and resistance to assimilation.

The Harmony Center alliance finished first in the 2011 elections; the reorganized Harmony party did so in 2014 and 2018. But neither the alliance nor the party ever entered the national government. Ethnic Latvian political groups formed majority coalitions without it. This was Harmony’s central tragedy — even when it won an election, it was doomed to remain in opposition.

For potential partners, disagreements over history and language remained an obstacle — above all, Harmony’s reluctance to acknowledge the Soviet occupation of Latvia explicitly and its equivocal position on recognizing Latvian as the sole official language. There was also distrust of the party’s ties to Moscow following the cooperation agreement it signed with United Russia in 2009.

That isolation created the central paradox: Harmony could explain its lack of results by saying that others were unwilling to let Russian speakers into government. But after several election cycles, questions arose about what another victory would achieve. The party won votes, secured the largest parliamentary faction, and found itself isolated again. Repeated victories brought it no closer to joining the government, and its leaders increasingly faced accusations that they were not taking power because they were comfortable remaining in opposition.

Why the victory in Riga mattered

Everything changed in 2009, when Harmony chairman Nils Ušakovs won power in Riga. The party could now show voters tangible results at the city level: free public transportation for pensioners and schoolchildren, free school lunches, and renovations of parks, the promenade, and public spaces. For Russian speakers, there were also symbolic gestures: the renovation of Riga’s Mikhail Chekhov Russian Theater, completed in 2010, and free Latvian-language classes for Riga residents. In 2017, Ušakovs promised that, starting in 2019, the Riga City Council would pay for students attending minority schools to take additional classes in their native languages.

But corruption scandals surrounding the city administration and internal conflicts undermined this source of support. In 2019, the regional development minister removed Ušakovs as mayor, citing failures in his oversight of local public transportation. After the snap elections in 2020, the party found itself in opposition in the capital as well.

After February 24, 2022, Harmony’s leadership condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That position alienated Kremlin supporters and tore the party apart. In the 2022 elections, Harmony finished ninth with 4.81% of the vote and failed to enter the Saeima for the first time. The result reflected accumulated internal problems, the loss of power in Riga, and the emergence of new, more radical groups seeking to represent Russian speakers.

So who’s running in the 2026 elections?

It is too early to declare that parties focused exclusively on Russians have disappeared: both Harmony Center and For Stability! are registered for the 2026 elections. Polls, however, project vote shares of 3.1% and 2.4%, respectively — well below the electoral threshold.

For Stability! is the most prominent contender for Harmony’s legacy. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, it won 6.8% of the vote and 11 seats. Its leader, Aleksejs Rosļikovs, regularly spoke about Russian being pushed out of public life. For example, during a June 2025 vote in the Saeima on a declaration about the consequences of Russification, Rosļikovs switched to Russian and shouted, “There are more of us, and Russian is our language!” He was then removed from the chamber. He built his campaign around his willingness to speak out on language issues and argued that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine was “not clear-cut.”

That radical approach, however, did not keep the party together. Lawmakers left for various reasons, and on February 18, 2026, its parliamentary faction was down to four members — fewer than the five required to maintain it. Rosļikovs ended up in Belarus in the spring, after traveling to Geneva and then to Minsk while facing charges of inciting ethnic hatred. A Riga court ordered him into custody and placed him on a wanted list. The party enters the fall elections with its parliamentary faction dissolved and its leader living abroad.

Other groups are also competing actively for Russian-speaking voters: Jūlija Stepaņenko’s Sovereign Power, running in an alliance with Young Latvians, and Ainārs Šlesers’ Latvia First. Stepaņenko defends the right to use Russian in the service sector and in business. Šlesers combines promises to revive the city’s economy with positions on issues important to Russian-speaking voters — in particular, he supports keeping Russian available as a school subject.

In the 2025 Riga City Council elections, Harmony failed to clear the 5% threshold. For Stability! won five of the 60 seats, Sovereign Power / Young Latvians won eight, and Latvia First won 13. This was another blow to Harmony’s hopes of winning back Russian votes, at least by regaining support in Riga, where the party had held a majority of the vote for almost a decade.

In the current elections, the Sovereign Power / Young Latvians alliance and Latvia First are counting on support from people disillusioned with their former representatives. If the final preelection polls prove accurate, the two could win 33 parliamentary seats between them — just under a third of the seats.

Why the parties can’t shake off their Kremlin ties

Another successor to ZaPChEL, the Latvian Russian Union, remained openly pro-Moscow. Its longtime leader, Tatjana Ždanoka, represented Latvia in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2024. She used her position to bring the situation of Latvia’s noncitizens to Europe’s attention and sought to have it treated as a Europe-wide problem rather than an internal Latvian matter. She proposed granting noncitizens in Latvia and Estonia the right to vote at least in municipal and European Parliament elections.

Ždanoka also cultivated ties with Russia: she attended Russian World assemblies, served on the presidium of the World Congress of Compatriots, and defended Moscow over its annexation of Crimea.

In January 2024, The Insider and its partners published an investigation based on Ždanoka’s correspondence. They reported that, for many years, she coordinated events, requested funding, and reported to people The Insider identified as officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB. Ždanoka says she did not know her contact was affiliated with the intelligence services.

In 2024, Latvia’s State Security Service, the country’s domestic security agency, launched a criminal investigation into Ždanoka’s possible cooperation with Russian intelligence services. The investigation continues, and Ždanoka denies the allegations.

A new investigation by The Insider, published in September 2026, shows that people close to Ždanoka remain involved in Latvian politics. Latvian Russian Union co-chair Andrejs Pagors and Ždanoka’s former assistant Anna Bondere are now running for Sovereign Power / Young Latvians.

These stories make life harder for politicians who want to represent Russian-speaking citizens while distancing themselves from the Kremlin. They have to explain both their own positions and how they differ from those of people who spent decades speaking for Latvia’s Russians. Meanwhile, suspicions about individual politicians’ loyalty extend to all their former voters.

As this year’s elections approach, the “Russian” parties have lost their former influence. The hierarchy in which one large group could claim to represent the entire Russian-speaking community has also collapsed. Yet no new political alternative has emerged to replace them.

A pro-European, Russian-speaking Latvian citizen is caught between two unappealing sides. On one side are populist groups willing to speak to them in Russian and on their behalf, but whose rhetoric expresses resentment and justifies Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Six in 10 voters for Latvia First / Young Latvians and four in 10 Latvia First supporters hold Ukraine or the West primarily responsible for the full-scale war.

On the other side are the parties of the ethnic Latvian majority: New Unity, the Progressives, the Union of Greens and Farmers, the United List, and the National Alliance. At various times, all have supported restrictions on Russian, including ending Russian-language public media broadcasts and removing Russian from ATMs.

Someone who supports Ukraine, sees their future in Latvia and Europe, and also values the Russian language simply has no one to vote for.

A shared language proved insufficient to build and sustain even one strong party. Any new politicians who eventually seek to represent Russian speakers will have to start the discussion about Russians’ place in Latvian society all over again.