Latvia’s coalition parties see no grounds for demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Evika Siliņa (New Unity) over the use of the Russian language in public media.
Asked to comment on the opposition National Alliance’s (NA) initiative to express no confidence in Siliņa, the head of the New Unity parliamentary faction, Edmunds Jurēvics, told the LETA news agency that the resignation demand is unfounded, does not correspond to the facts, and is addressed to the wrong institutions. He stressed that in a democratic state, the government does not interfere in the editorial decisions of public media.
Jurēvics emphasized that responsibility for the development of public media, editorial guidelines, and the implementation of the national security framework lies with the Council of Public Electronic Mass Media (SEPLP), not with the Cabinet of Ministers.
Jurēvics also predicted that, in the context of the upcoming Saeima elections expected this year, the opposition will regularly come forward with formal motions calling for the prime minister’s resignation. However, he said that New Unity does not support such initiatives. He added that as of the 1st of January, a public media reform has come into force, strengthening the role of the Latvian language while also allowing space for other minority languages.
The head of the The Progressives parliamentary faction, Andris Šuvajevs, told LETA that
The Progressives will not support the resignation demand either.
“We trust public media to implement the National Security Concept appropriately within its remit,” Šuvajevs explained.
Meanwhile, the head of the Union of Greens and Farmers (ZZS) parliamentary faction, Harijs Rokpelnis, said that while the budget drafting process had been intense and not all of ZZS’s priorities were achieved, this did not constitute grounds for supporting the prime minister’s resignation.
“Not everything satisfies us,” Rokpelnis acknowledged, but he added that funding for Russian-language content in public media was not among ZZS’s priorities and, in any case, is not a sufficient reason to back a no-confidence motion. He stressed that ZZS will reject the resignation demand.
As previously reported, the National Alliance refers to the 2023 National Security Concept, which recommends that from the 1st of January, 2026, public media content should be produced only in Latvian and in languages belonging to the European cultural space. The aim is to strengthen a unified information environment based on Latvian and other European Union, European Economic Area, and EU candidate country languages. According to the concept, state funding for Russian-language content should be discontinued, while
such content could continue in commercial media using private funds.
The National Alliance argues that the Cabinet of Ministers continues to allocate state funding for Russian-language content in public media, which it sees as contradicting the goal of a unified information space. The opposition’s draft decision to express no confidence in the prime minister has been placed on the agenda of the Saeima session scheduled for Thursday, the 15th of January.
Latvia’s government is composed of the prime minister and 14 ministers from The Progressives, New Unity, and ZZS. Opposition parties have called for Siliņa’s resignation four times over the past year, but she has survived all parliamentary confidence votes. The most recent no-confidence vote took place in October last year, when 46 MPs voted against dismissal, 38 voted in favor, and one abstained.
Read also: BNN IN FOCUS | Migration, security and sovereignty: Filips Rajevskis on what Latvia should not repeat
Read also: Proposal to express no confidence in Latvia’s Prime Minister over Russian-language content in public media