Photograph Source: Saeima – Flickr: Saeimas sēžu zāle – CC BY-SA 2.0

Europe’s political classes were backfooted by Latvia’s Parliament (Saeima) vote to pull out of the Istanbul Convention (IC), the treaty protecting women from violence. They then reset and punted on the IC’s future as several protests in the thousands took to Latvia’s streets. Backstory to the vote for Latvia’s IC exit, however, is less about women’s rights, but insider politics and the decreasing returns on “European Values” for defending the “European Project.” In brief, Latvia’s opposition parties, Latvia First Party, headed by oligarch Ainars Slessers, was previously voted out in 2009, then staged a political return riding our last decade’s global wave of rightwing populism. Then there is the Green & Farmers Party, both rural in character but also led by the flamboyant former oligarch, Aivars Lembergs. Lembergs was briefly jailed in 2021 for corruption, thus relegating him to gray cardinal status in Latvia’s politics thereafter. Lembergs and Slessers are two of the three most powerful oligarchs ever produced by Latvia. This opposition’s third leg comes from the now main party representing Latvia’s Russian speakers, Stability. All three parties are positioning themselves for an allied win eleven months hence in Latvia’s parliament elections. They see an opening in the IC’s language on gender as socially constructed rather than fixed as being alien cultural norms advanced by Brussels and Latvian elites whose lives remain distant from the realities of working people.

Latvia’s liberal parties have defended the Istanbul Convention’s noble goals of protecting women’s safety by wrapping it in the shroud of “European values.” European values have carried the day in endless Latvian political contests the past three decades among Latvians seeing themselves as stalwart allies of Brussels’ European project. Latvia’s rejection of the IC, however, signals a European values fatigue growing within the post-Soviet space.

Latvian, if not Baltic, women have broken many glass ceilings. The EU’s four female prime ministers are in the three Baltic States (Latvia and Lithuania). And, the third Baltic State, Estonia, had a female prime minister (Kaja Kallas)........

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