Inga POPOVAITE

Researcher at Kaunas University of Technology Faculty of Social Sciences, Art, and Humanities.

Social Democrats celebrated a clear victory in the Lithuanian parliament elections. The final round of national elections on 27 October ended the four-year rule of the centre-right coalition led by conservatives and paved the way for the centre-left coalition. Social democrats (52 seats) are expected to form a majority cabinet with two smaller parties, the Democratic Union (14 seats) and the Union of Farmers and Greens (8 seats). However, the country is currently the only Baltic one that has no legal recognition of same-sex partnerships. And the chances of it happening are murky with the incoming centre-left government. 

The perspective of the centre-left coalition does not excite LGBTQ+ rights advocates. On many social issues, including same-sex partnerships, Lithuania’s left is more conservative than the outgoing centre-right government. Debates on LGBTQ+ rights versus traditional family values were high on the agenda in the outgoing parliament. In 2020, the Freedom party mobilised their voters around same-sex partnerships and marijuana decriminalisation and won enough seats to become partners in the ruling coalition. 

Same-sex partnerships became synonymous with the Freedom Party in the public discourse. However, the Freedom party was not able to mobilise enough votes both within the coalition and from the opposition to recognize same-sex civil unions. Their initiated draft civil partnership law never reached the final voting stage. Failure to deliver the legalisation of same-sex partnerships resulted in the Freedom Party losing support and being voted out of the parliament. 

While it is unfortunate to have fewer MPs that are openly dedicated to LGBTQ+ equality, this also opens the possibility for the civil partnership to be disassociated from any specific party. When the civil partnership law was proposed in 2021, 5 out of 13 Social Democrats, then in the opposition, voted against it, despite their programme at that time also including same-sex partnership. During this election campaign, the Social Democrats’ leadership implied that the party would not support the current draft law, neither in this nor in the next term, as it was ‘not their project’.

Will Social Democrats actually propose their own version of the legislation? One can only hope. The current party programme does not contain references to same-sex partnerships anymore, and talks about non-discrimination, based on sexual orientation in the most abstract terms possible. Their potential coalition partners are even more socially conservative. The Democratic Union criticised the current version of the draft (which is already a watered-down version of the original proposal) as being too divisive and vowed to find a new solution that would be acceptable to the Catholic church and the LGBTQ+ community alike. The Union of Farmers and Greens openly declare traditional family values and are explicitly against same-sex marriages. 

Thus, even if Social Democrats propose their own version of same-sex partnership law, they will face an uphill battle in the coalition and will have to count on the opposition’s support. It remains to be seen whether in such a scenario the conservatives and the liberals will take the high road or will the LGBTQ+ community continue to be kept hostage in the ongoing political battle between the conservative left and liberal right.