FROM MONOPOLY TO FRAGMENTATION: TRANSFORMING RUSSIAN-SPEAKING ELECTORAL LANDSCAPE IN LATVIA

Abstract

Geopolitical turbulence of the year 2022 had an impact on the Russian-speaking electoral field in Latvia as well: once monopolized by the «Harmony», now it is split among four «Russian» and even some «Latvian» parties. The article sets out the main trends in the 2022 Saeima elections and focuses on voting features of the Russian-speaking electorate. The correlational analysis allows to identify the parties depending on «Russian» votes: those are «For Stability!», «Harmony», the Latvian Russian Union and «Sovereign Power». Only one of them managed to get into the parliament – that is «For Stability» – the party of the former «Harmony» member A. Roslikov, who secured the victory by the skilled use of populist anti-poverty and anti-injustice rhetoric and an active TikTok campaign. The spatial autocorrelation analysis shows that despite a radical decrease of the «Russian» representation, the ethnolinguistic voting polarization remains strong, and the deepest cleavage lies between the Latgalian municipalities with a large non-Latvian population and other Latvian regions. A sharp reduction of the «Russian» representation in Saeima can lead to further marginalization of the Russian-speaking community in Latvia.