Starting in 2030, only political parties with at least 1,000 members will be able to participate in the Saeima elections, instead of the current requirement of 500 members. This decision was made today by the Saeima’s State Administration and Local Government Committee while reviewing amendments to the Saeima Election Law.
Previously, on April 16, the committee supported a proposal by independent MP Andrejs Ceļapīters, which stipulated that a party wishing to submit a candidate list for the Saeima elections must be registered according to the law, founded no later than one year before the elections, and have no fewer than 1,000 members. This means that the current membership threshold would need to be doubled.
Today, the deputies supported the committee’s own proposal to raise the threshold starting in 2030, when the next regular Saeima elections after the upcoming ones are scheduled. Therefore, the change will not apply to the next elections, set for autumn 2026.
The proposal was adopted without extensive discussion.
At the end of the meeting, the committee approved the draft amendments to the Saeima Election Law in the second reading, and the Saeima is scheduled to consider them on May 22. Today, the committee had to review the remaining 23 of the total 43 proposals in order to move the issue forward. None of the proposals prompted significant debate; most amendments involved editorial clarifications.
As previously reported, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), in its informative report on monitoring political party activities, pointed out that party members are currently not recorded in the political party register, and it is not possible for the Enterprise Register to verify whether the information in membership lists matches the data in the Population Register, whether all listed individuals actually exist, or whether the same person is listed as a member of multiple parties.
The MoJ emphasized that the problem is not only the lack of verification of the listed member data, but also the absence of control over whether the listed individuals are indeed party members. Moreover, there is no monitoring to ensure that the information in the member registries is kept up to date.
The ministry also reminded that political parties in Latvia must have at least 200 Latvian citizens as members, and if the party has more than 400 members, at least half of them must be Latvian citizens.