Abstract
Restoring their statehood in the early 1990s, Estonia and Latvia established parliamentary republics, while Lithuania opted for semi-presidentialism. The paper is a case-oriented comparative study explaining this difference with the Lithuanian “exceptionality” in focus. Part of the answer is differences of interwar constitutional history: while Lithuania and Estonia had to cope with the legacy of three constitutions each, Latvia inherited only the parliamentary Constitution of 1922, because its dictator Karlis Ulmanis did not bother to constitutionalize his rule. Another part is differences in the balance of power during the time of extraordinary politics when constitutions were made. The alternation between the presidential and parliamentary phases of semi-presidentialism and the “perils of presidentialism” did manifest repeatedly in the Lithuanian post-communist politics, while Estonia and Latvia did know next to nothing about them, except for the “Zatlers episode” in Latvia in 2009–2011.The infamous Rolandas Paksas’ impeachment in 2003–2004 and controversial features in the performance style of the Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė are important illustrations of the shortcomings of semi-presidentialism, which could be cured by Lithuania’s switch to the Baltic pattern of parliamentary presidency. However, as time goes on, the probability of a constitutional reform decreases in all Baltic States, mainly due to increasing acquis constitutionnel and habituation.
Highlights
Restoring their statehood in the early 1990s, Estonia and Latvia established parliamentary republics, while Lithuania opted for semi-presidentialism
While international contributions on postcommunist parliamentarism vs. semi-presidentialism are all comparative in their approach, I was not able to find a single paper with the special focus on the Baltic States: why only Lithuania is a semi-presidential democracy, while Estonia and Latvia represent its parliamentary variety? The present paper tries to answer this question
For the goals of the present contribution, three points are of importance: (1) the success of impeachment was open until some two weaks before the final Seimas voting on April 6, 2004; (2) Paksas’s re-election was possible until the ruling of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court on 25 May 2004, which stated that an individual who had been removed from office through the process of impeachment for breaking his oath of office may never seek office requiring an oath; (3) in the case of the failure of Paksas’ impeachment or his comeback, there was a danger of a slippery slope towards populist delegative democracy in Lithuania under the guise of semi-presidentialism; (4) most importantly, Paksas or his like would never had a chance to be elected parliamentary president
Summary
The explanation of the inter-Baltic differences in the post-communist state-building must start not from Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika but from the interwar time, because the primary goal of the Baltic national movements was the restitution of the independent states and the rectification of historical unjustices by the Soviet occupation in 1940. For the goals of the present contribution, three points are of importance: (1) the success of impeachment was open until some two weaks before the final Seimas voting on April 6, 2004; (2) Paksas’s re-election was possible until the ruling of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court on 25 May 2004, which stated that an individual who had been removed from office through the process of impeachment for breaking his oath of office may never seek office requiring an oath; (3) in the case of the failure of Paksas’ impeachment or his comeback, there was a danger of a slippery slope towards populist delegative democracy in Lithuania under the guise of semi-presidentialism; (4) most importantly, Paksas or his like would never had a chance to be elected parliamentary president. In the longtime perspective Zatlers’s episode only helped to consolidate the frail Latvian parliamentary democracy, while the “Paksasgate” had a long-time negative impact on the development of Lithuanian politics (see 2012b)
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