LW's Guide to the 2026 Election

So what's very important to keep in mind, first of all, is that Latvia is a parliamentary republic, so parliament is really at the center of Latvia's political system.

It's very, very important because when the 100 members of parliament are elected, then they form a coalition, which basically forms the basis of a government.

So the coalition comes together and they, so there's a prime minister candidate that is suggested by the president that's nominated by the president, but the coalition has to vote to agree to that candidate.

So generally, the prime minister comes from one of those parties.

Doesn't necessarily have to, but traditionally, it's kind of expected that the prime minister candidate of one of those parties, not necessarily the party that gets the most votes, because there are quite a few situations in recent political history in Latvia where that's not been the case.

For many years, For about 10 years, actually, the most popular party in Latvia was a party called Saskinia or Harmony, which for those of you who've been listening for a while, we used to talk about that party a lot.

That was a party that was led and still has an active member, Nils Ushakovs, who was the previous mayor of Riga.

And they came in first place in a few parliamentary elections, but they never had a prime minister.

In fact, they were never even part of a governing coalition because that party was seen as too close together.

The party of Vladimir Putin united Russia, they had a cooperation agreement for a short time, and although they tried to back away from that as much as possible and kind of reinvent themselves, it never really worked.

So they came in first place, had the most votes in quite a few of the elections, but never anywhere close to 50%, or 51% really, which you'd need to have enough members to be able to form a majority government.

Latvia has pretty much always, during its democratic history, been governed by coalitions of multiple parties, which makes what happens after the elections a lot of times even more interesting.

There was also a situation, so in the 2018 election, you might remember back, for those of you who When the Latvia Weekly podcast started almost eight years ago, because the podcast started right after the 2018 election during the very messy coalition formation situation.

So Jauna Vienotiba, which we'll be talking about very soon.

They were the smallest party in parliament, but the prime minister ended up being from their party because the bigger parties could not agree with one another over who would become the prime minister.

And the prime minister from candidate from that party, Christian's courage was seen as a compromise candidate.

Again, just to be very clear, whichever party gets the most percentage, that doesn't automatically mean that that candidate is going to become the prime minister.

So because they have to have enough parties that have enough seats in parliaments to form a coalition that gets at least 51 votes in parliament, or they would have to form a minority government, which is very, very tricky as well.

So that's one thing to keep in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Latvia has a proportional system.

So there are only five constituencies in all of Latvia.

So it's not like, for example, so I live in Jelgova, for example, and I'm not able to vote in the election because I am not a citizen of Latvia.

I'm only allowed to vote in municipal and theoretically also European elections.

But if I were to vote in Jelgova, we'd Yelgova doesn't, it's not like in the UK or in the United States where there is one deputy from Yelgova or from like a certain part of Yelgova which represents us.

There are five main constituencies.