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With the EU elections approaching, the European Parliament (EP) has launched a communication campaign to stress the importance of voting to protect democracy. Its slogan: "Vote! Don't let others decide for you."
What the EP and Latvia's electoral commission will not say is that the "other" is Russia. Yet the institutions are evidently trying to get the message across: one campaign video shows grandparents telling their grandchildren about the horrors of war, about how they struggled to win their freedom. Indeed, the Second World War is directly analogous to the Kremlin's bloody war in Ukraine and its attempts to influence foreign societies – to influence people's democratic choices
For it is in elections that Russia wants to see a dividend from its hybrid war. Election results are one of the Kremlin’s "key performance indicators". And the effort does not seem to be in vain. That was shown by Slovakia: all it took was an election for this erstwhile Ukraine ally to suddenly decide that sending arms to Kyiv was unnecessary. Or Hungary, which will use every trick in the book to slyly undermine Ukraine.
In an interview with Delfi TV, former Latvian president Valdis Zatlers put it most bluntly: "This is a wartime election."
That is why people should vote. Every ballot counts. No matter how far away the infamous corridors of Brussels may seem, it is there that Europe's support for Ukraine is being forged.
This big picture seems to be becoming clearer at last. In Latvia's 2022 parliamentary elections, turnout finally increased, from 58.85% to 59.43%. But, as in the rest of Europe, Latvia pays far less attention to the EU than it pays to local politics. In the 2019 election, only 33.53% of Latvians voted, compared to 30.24% in 2014. That was significantly less than for national elections.
That is jarring, if only because Latvia has political parties that would be delighted to see Latvians stay at home. We have one candidate, the leader of the Centre Party, who says that the Crimean peninsula belongs to Russia. We have candidates who promise to reconsider Latvia's relationship to the EU – for the “For Stability” party, it is a choice between the national interest and withdrawal from the "strangling union" (Needless to say, this party is also in favour of lifting sanctions against Russia).
