Latvian lawmakers elect current foreign minister as first gay president in post-Soviet area

Rinkēvičs election may herald a government reshuffle

The Latvian parliament or Saeima on May 31 elected the current Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs to the largely representative, ceremonial and non-partisan post of President.

The former radio journalist, defense ministry official and presidential advisor also becomes the first openly gay head of state in a post-Soviet country. He declared his sexual orientation on Twitter in November, 2014 when he was already foreign minister.

By apparent coincidence, he was elected during the Latvian LGBTQ community’s Pride Week and ahead of a planned Pride march in downtown Riga on Saturday, June 3.

In public discussions leading up to the vote in parliament, Rinkēvičs expressed his personal support for recognizing the rights of same-sex and non-married couples by some form of civil partnership law. The Latvian parliament has rejected or blocked such a law for almost 20 years.

Rinkēvičš won in a third round of voting by lawmakers by 52 votes of the 87 parliamentarians present and casting their ballots out of the 100-member Saeima.

The soon-to-be ex-foreign minister got 10 votes of the opposition social democratic Progressives  (Pro) whose candidate Elīna Pinto withdrew from the vote after the second round and also votes from the opposition Green and Farmer’s Alliance (ZZS).

At a press conference soon after his election, Rinkēvičs, hitherto a member of the centrist liberal New Unity party of Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš told journalists that in line with the Latvian constitution, he would not get involved in partisan politics.

However, asked about divisions in Latvian society in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, he said he would work to influence those he called “confused” about whether to side with Western values or Russia.

Rinkēvičs, 49, has been foreign minister of the NATO and European Union member country under three different governments since September 2011. His election leaves the office of foreign minister vacant ahead of the NATO Summit in Vilnius in the middle of July

Latvia’s new president, the outgoing foreign minister Edgars Rinkēvičs. Photo: New Unity party

The vote for Rinkēvičs followed a morning of political debate among lawmakers and the withdrawal of Pinto, a lawyer and former employee of various European Union (EU) institutions.

The third and final voting round was a contest between Rinkēvičs and Uldis Pīlēns, an architect and entrepreneur nominated by the United List  (AS) political alliance, a governing coalition member who broke with Prime Minister Krišjāņis Kariņš plan to have a single candidate from all parties forming the government.

The split in the coalition led some political commentators to speculate whether the vote for president would also signal a breakup of the government. Latvian TV now quotes Kariņš as saying that the composition of the current three-party coalition could change after talks in the next few days.

One rumor circulating is that Andris Sprūds, a lawmaker from Pro and former director of the Latvian Institute of Foreign Affairs could be selected to replace Rinkēvičs as foreign minister, essentially bringing the left-liberal social democrats into government.

Bringing either Pro or the ZZS – a party alliance linked to Aivars Lembergs, a politician and alleged oligarch convicted of corruption and money laundering - into government would put the third coalition party – the conservative nationalist National Alliance (NA) under pressure to leave the government. NA lawmakers, who initially leaned toward backing the re-election of the outgoing president Egils Levits.  Levits withdrew his candidacy citing concerns that he could be re-elected only with support from what he called pro-Kremlin and oligarch-linked parties- a reference to the For Stability! (S!) opposition party supported by some of Latvia’s ethnic Russians and the populist Latvia First (LPV) party led by opposition politician Ainārs Šlesers.

Addressing the Saeima ahead of the May 31 vote, Šlesers  said he considered that election of a president any from the opposition should be considered as a signal of the collapse of Kariņš coalition.

On May 27, Šlesers along with S! leader Aleksejs Rošlikovs addressed a rally of around 1000 persons by the downtown Freedom Monument in the Latvian capital, demanding the resignation of Kariņš and Levits and calling for dismissal of the Saeima if that didn’t happen.

Šlesers, the founder of several earlier political parties, said he favored forming what he called “a government of professionals” under the LPV. The former government minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s is seen as “milder” Latvian version of Donald Trump because of his supposed anti-establishment and anti-elite views and a party program that basically says “make Latvia great again,”

If the Kariņš government does resign, Šlesers will  partly get what he wished for – President Levits replaced – but a government with Pro and ZZS is not what he wanted