Linas Jegelevičius
First it was the President, who was caught having hidden his membership in the Communist Party (CPSU), now it turns out that 18 Lithuanian MPs did not declare the past CPSU affiliation in their candidate questionnaires before the 2020 Seimas elections.
The 15min online news site made the list public in the beginning of the week, noting that, to make the disclosure, tons of archival documents were reviewed and/or the MPs’ former colleagues were interviewed. Of the 20 MPs, two have declared the membership.
However, few outed lawmakers beat their chest now. On the contrary, some of them are defiant and furious.
“Am I criminal now or what?
Many of my current colleagues were not even born, when I was doing a lot for the country’s sport community back in the day. Being a septuagenarian man now, I’m much more patriotic and loving the motherland and caring for it than the majority of the extreme left-leaning young legislators promulgating the Leninist family policy and who do not know the history,” Dainius Kepenis, MP of the opposition Farmers and Greens Union, told BNN.
In the past, he headed the country’s Sport Department and has been a vocal and staunch promoter of healthy lifestyles.
Just a quick glance at the list purports that
nearly all parliamentary political groups are interlaced through the CPSU thread.
Five of the MPs who belonged to the party are in the Democrats “For Lithuania” group, four among the ruling Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats (HU-LCD), the Farmers and Greens (LFGU), and the Social Democrats (LSDP) each, two in the Liberal Movement’s group, and one in the Freedom Party’s group.
15min’s investigative journalism team has found the personal files of 12 current MPs among CPSU and Komsomol documents stored in the Lithuanian Special Archive.
These are the HU-LCD’s Kęstutis Masiulis and Algis Strelčiūnas, Vilija Targamadze, Algirdas Stončaitis and Zigmantas Balčytis of “For Lithuania”, the LFGU’s Antanas Vinkus, Dainius Kepenis, Laima Nagienė, Rimantė Šalasevičiūtė and Algimantas Dumbrava, Social Democrat Liudas Jonaitis, and the Freedom Party’s Artūras Žukauskas.
Šalasevičiūtė and Dumbrava are the two MPs who declared their former CPSU membership in their candidate questionnaires.
The remaining former CPSU members were identified through interviews with MPs selected based on their age or work experience, the portal said.
These are the HU-LCD’s Antanas Čepononis and Kazys Starkevičius, Social Democratic MPs Rasa Budbergytė, Vidmantas Kanopa and Algirdas Sysas, Liberal MPs Jonas Varkalys and Ričardas Juška, and Algirdas Butkevičius of “For Lithuania”.
However, the revelation did not sit well with the country’s prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė, the speaker, Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen and the Foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis.
The PM says lawmakers who have not disclosed their membership of the Soviet Communist Party
should not look for justifications, but should be honest and admit their mistake.
“The journalists have carried out an investigation, they have made it public, everybody knows it, and now let those people who have the duty to explain themselves do it. I think there’s no need to look for justifications, they just need to admit it as a mistake,” the prime minister told reporters at the Seimas on Tuesday, the 26th of September.
She said that those who failed to declare such a fact “did not act very wisely”.
“Maybe people thought that the parties are only those of an independent Lithuania, which is what the people who did not declare said, and we could assume that some people had links with the Communist Party, given their past careers and membership of some political forces,” the prime minister said to BNS, a Lithuanian newswire.
But Dainius Kepenis is defiant: “What kind of mistake is she talking? I was the first to rid of the Communist party ticket.”
“In 2016, when running for Seimas, I did point out the membership, but in the 2020 Seimas election, the questionnaire did not mandate the Seimas election candidates to state it,” D. Kepenis emphasised to BNN.
Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen called on all the MPs to “refresh” their memories and
make necessary adjustments in their public parliamentary files.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, who chairs the ruling HU-LCD, says he was not aware of some of his colleagues’ former membership of the Soviet Communist Party.
“That’s news for me,” the politician told reporters at the Seimas on Tuesday, asked about the fact that some HU-LCD representatives in the parliament had concealed this fact of their biography. “I have a bad opinion about this, but that’s the trend we have. Politicians have just made the decision to simply not report these facts.”
To shun such things in the future, he said, candidates should be obliged to disclose which party they belonged to.
Despite the fact that they concealed their Communist Party membership, Landsbergis says he has trust in those colleagues.
“What else we can say? I know the people, I trust them, and the voters know them quite well,” he said to BNS. “It seems to me that voters are able to make up their minds and draw their own conclusions, based on their existing work or on the very long history of their work during the independence period, which allows people to get a broader picture.”
Also on Tuesday, the Seimas endorsed an amendment to the Electoral Code,
obliging politicians standing for election to declare their former communist affiliation,
as well as the positions they held within these structures.
Under the bill, if a candidate disclosed such information, this fact would be published on the candidate’s election poster. And if the candidate concealed this information, the Central Electoral Commission would not register such a person as a candidate or would remove them from the elections.
The Communist Party of Lithuania was founded in 1918 and banned after Lithuania regained independence in 1991. Currently, candidates are only obliged to state whether they have knowingly collaborated with the KGB.
It was revealed in April 2022 that Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda did not indicate his membership of the Communist Party when filling in the presidential candidate form.
Political scientist Ignas Kalpokas, docent of Vytautas the Great University (VDU) told Žinių radijas earlier this week that
voters of some political forces will not like the revealed facts.
“Voters of some political forces are more sensitive to these things. Let’s say, for the representatives of the Homeland Union, who concealed such things, the impact could potentially be even greater. Also, the electorate of the Freedom Party is more progressive, so it would also respond to that one MP,” he said, adding that “the disclosure will not cause a huge rejection reaction for the voters of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party or the Democratic Union “Vardan Lietuvos”.
According to him, essentially no violation was committed, so withdrawing from the parties would be too drastic a decision, especially that obligation to declare such membership was not required in the 2020 Parliament election.