NextFin News - Latvia heads to the polls on 3 October with a paradox at the centre of its campaign: the prime minister is more popular than he has ever been, yet the coalition he would need to govern is weaker than at any point in the run-up to the vote. Andris Kulbergs, the former racing driver-turned-premier who took office only in May after his predecessor's government collapsed, leads the United List at 14.4% in the latest SKDS poll. But his most acceptable partners — the pro-European New Unity and the agrarian Greens and Farmers Union — are polling at 4.3% and 4.8%, both at or below the 5% threshold that decides who enters the 100-seat Saeima. The election is therefore less a referendum on Russia's war next door than a stress test of whether Latvia's pro-Western centre can survive its own fragmentation while the populist right and a reconfigured Russian-speaking protest vote surge behind it.
The campaign has been dominated by security concerns and the cost of living in the NATO and European Union member state that borders Russia and is home to a significant Russian-speaking minority. One third of those polled say they are either undecided or do not intend to vote, leaving the final outcome unusually open for a country that has prided itself on post-2014 political cohesion.
The Race in Numbers
Latvia's 15th Saeima election on Saturday 3 October will decide 100 parliamentary seats under proportional representation, with a 5% threshold measured against votes cast rather than the whole electorate. Fourteen party lists and 1,428 candidates are contesting. Advance voting opened on 28 September and runs to 2 October; as of 1 October, at least 110,000 voters — 7.12% of those eligible — had cast advance ballots, and with 4,907 postal vote applications the Central Election Commission counted more than 115,800, or 7.44% of eligible voters. Voters may change their choice right up to election day, and only the last vote counts.
The backdrop is a government crisis that reshaped the race. Prime Minister Evika Siliņa resigned in May after a dispute with her defence minister, Andris Spruds, over the handling of Ukrainian drones that fell on Latvian territory; the liberal Progressives withdrew their support, and with less than six months to the election there was no possibility of dissolving parliament early. President Edgars Rinkēvičs turned to the opposition, nominating Kulbergs as prime minister-designate on 16 May, and the Saeima confirmed his cabinet on 28 May. In roughly three and a half months in office his government agreed with Kyiv to jointly build a strike-drone manufacturing plant and has blocked moves to lift sanctions on Putin-linked oligarchs — a record his party wants voters to reward.
The September SKDS poll, conducted 4–16 September, puts the United List first at 14.4% among all voters, followed by Sovereign Power and the Alliance of Young Latvians at 9.4%, Latvia First at 9.2%, the Progressives at 6.2%, the National Alliance at 5.6%, the Greens and Farmers Union at 4.8%, and New Unity at 4.3%. Recalculated among decided voters only, the United List reaches 22.7%, with Sovereign Power and the Alliance of Young Latvians at 14.1% and Latvia First at 13.3%. Nearly one in seven respondents — 14.9% — say they do not intend to vote.
The field the prime minister must navigate is narrow. The National Alliance, a nationalist party founded in 2010, campaigns on protecting family and traditional values and promotes a hardline approach towards Russia and Latvia's Russian minority; it is almost certain to join a coalition. But its seats alone will not deliver a majority, which leaves the United List with two plausible partners: Latvia First, the personalist populist project of millionaire property developer Ainārs Šlesers, or the Progressives, a social-liberal party ideologically distant from the centre-right premier. That arithmetic is the whole election in miniature.
The Kulbergs Effect Is Real — and It Is Personal, Not Institutional
The United List's rise is the cleanest story in the campaign. In the June poll it stood at 9.8%, tied with Latvia First; by September it had reached 14.4% among all voters and 22.7% among decided voters. Political scientist Filips Rajevskis has framed the mechanism plainly: public opinion carries momentum, and once a party's rating is on the rise it takes a major scandal to reverse it. Kulbergs, a businessman with no prior premiership and a hawkish stance towards Russia, has benefited from that inertia the moment he became head of government — an incumbency bounce accruing to a party that was in opposition for most of the parliamentary term.
But the bounce has a limit, and it is structural. Latvia's party system is among the most fragmented in the European Union; governments are almost always three- or four-party coalitions, and party labels recombine between elections. A personal rating attached to a prime minister does not automatically transfer to his junior partners. That is why the United List can lead while its natural coalition — New Unity, the Greens and Farmers Union, the National Alliance — collectively polls at roughly 15%, a number that leaves a majority out of reach unless one of the populist forces is invited in. The mechanism is not "voters like Kulbergs"; it is "voters like Kulbergs but distrust the parties he needs." That gap between leader and party system is what makes this a structural problem rather than a cyclical dip.
This is the cyclical-versus-structural call at the heart of the election. The United List's surge is cyclical: it is a leader-driven incumbency effect that will mean-revert if the coalition proves unstable or if the economy disappoints. The fragmentation beneath it is structural: it is baked into an electoral system and a party culture that reward personalist vehicles over programmatic parties, and it will not self-correct simply because a popular premier wins. The two forces point in opposite directions — a short-term win for Kulbergs, a long-term headache for whoever governs.
The Russian-Speaking Vote Did Not Vanish — It Migrated
The most consequential shift is not on the government side but on the opposition flank. For two decades, the Russian-speaking minority's parliamentary voice was Harmony, a centre-left party that repeatedly topped the poll yet remained in opposition because no Latvian-led party would partner with it. Harmony collapsed in the 2022 election, falling from 19% in 2018 to 4%, and this year it is polling at 1.8% among all voters and 2.4% among decided voters — below the threshold, with former heavyweight Jānis Urbanovičs as its headline candidate.
The votes have not disappeared. The Geopolitics and Security Studies Centre in Vilnius argues that Russia's full-scale war destroyed the ambiguity on which Harmony's model of representation rested: a party that could speak for Russian speakers while remaining acceptable to the Latvian mainstream. With that ambiguity gone, the protest electorate has migrated. For Stability!, the explicitly pro-Russia populist party, is polling at 2.8% among all voters — below the threshold — and its leader, Aleksejs Rosļikovs, is a wanted man hiding in Belarus, declared wanted in Latvia for incitement of national and ethnic hatred. Yet he remains on the ballot. The larger beneficiary is Sovereign Power and the Alliance of Young Latvians, led by Jūlija Stepaņenko, which combines social populism, values conservatism and sovereigntist rhetoric and now sits second in the national rating at 9.4%. Stepaņenko's father has been blacklisted in Latvia, and her family has been reported friendly with the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
The distinction matters. For Stability! is an openly pro-Kremlin vehicle; Sovereign Power and the Alliance of Young Latvians is a domestic populist force that absorbs Russian-speaking grievance without being a Russian proxy. Sergejs Potapkins, a former deputy chairman of the Latvian parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, puts the point sharply: the "Russian question" now exists "not as a question of the existence of pro-Russian parties, but as a question of political visibility" for a substantial part of the population. As long as systemic parties do not offer an integration agenda, he argues, that space is filled by populists exploiting grievance and fear.
"The Russian question now exists not as a question of the existence of pro-Russian parties, but as a question of political visibility for a substantial part of the population," says Sergejs Potapkins, a former deputy chairman of the Latvian parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee.
Latvia First: The "Latvian Trump" and the Foreign-Policy Fault Line
Ainārs Šlesers's Latvia First is the wildcard that could decide the coalition. Šlesers, a veteran populist tycoon with past business ties to Russian oligarchs, presents himself as the "Latvian Trump," and the party's platform mirrors that positioning: tax cuts, reduced government spending, and overtures to Russian-speaking voters. On foreign policy, the party supports Ukraine's accession to the European Union but does not support Ukraine joining NATO, on the grounds that the United States opposes it.
That is the fault line a United List–led government would have to manage. Latvia has been one of Ukraine's most reliable supporters per capita, and any dilution of the NATO line would reverberate well beyond Riga — through the Baltic defence posture, through EU sanctions cohesion, and through Washington's confidence in its northern flank. The risk is not that Latvia First will dictate foreign policy from a junior ministry; it is that a dependent prime minister, short of a majority, pays for survival with vetoes, delayed decisions, and rhetorical softening. Coalition governments in Riga have a habit of surviving by postponing the fights that would break them.
The second-order effect is what allies should watch, not the headline result. A United List victory is already the consensus expectation; the pricing error would be to treat a Kulbergs win as stability. If his majority depends on Latvia First, the transmission channel runs from a fragile parliamentary arithmetic to slower defence procurement, softer sanctions enforcement, and a more transactional tone in Brussels — even if no minister ever says the word "neutrality." In a region where credibility is the currency of deterrence, delay is a policy choice.
The Counter-Thesis: The Centre Holds Because the Alternatives Are Unacceptable
The strongest case against a populist surge is not that populism is weak — it is that Latvian voters have repeatedly rejected it when it matters. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, no clearly pro-Russian party won a seat in Latvia, while the liberal-conservative New Unity and the national-conservative National Alliance took the most seats. Turnout in the 2022 Saeima election was 59.14%, and Rajevskis notes a hypothesis that Russian-speaking uncertainty after the outbreak of the war depressed participation then, while Latvian-speaking participation compensated. If that uncertainty has now faded and Russian-speaking turnout rises, the beneficiary may not be the Kremlin's friends; it may be any party that can credibly claim to deliver material improvements — which is precisely what Sovereign Power and Latvia First are promising.
The centre's defence, then, rests on a negative argument: voters may be angry, but the alternatives are worse. That argument has held before. The question this cycle is whether anger over the cost of living outweighs fear of the populist flank. The 14.9% non-voter share is the swing bloc. If most of them stay home, the pro-Western parties keep control of the agenda even with a smaller coalition. If they turn out for the populists, the arithmetic changes.
What Comes Next: Three Scenarios
The base case is a Kulbergs victory without a clean majority: the United List finishes first, the National Alliance enters government, and the premier is forced to choose between Latvia First and the Progressives, or to attempt a broader coalition that includes a weakened New Unity. In that scenario, Latvia's pro-Ukraine and pro-NATO course continues, but decision-making slows and the government's centre of gravity shifts rightward on economics and migration.
The upside case for the pro-Western camp is that New Unity and the Greens and Farmers Union both clear 5%, allowing a recreation of the pre-May coalition under Kulbergs's leadership. That would be the most stable outcome and the one allies would prefer — continuity with a fresh mandate. The downside case is that one or both centre parties fall below the threshold, forcing the United List into dependence on Latvia First and handing Šlesers leverage over the sanctions and NATO agenda.
What to watch: the final polling numbers before election day; whether New Unity and the Greens and Farmers Union hold above 5%; and the advance-turnout trajectory, which as of 1 October stood at 7.44% of eligible voters including postal applications. The falsifying signal for the "centre holds" thesis is simple: if Latvia First and Sovereign Power together exceed 30% of the vote, the populist right has moved from protest force to government-shaping force, and Latvia's consensus foreign policy enters a new, more contested phase.
Latvia is not electing a foreign policy this weekend — it is electing whether its prime minister is strong enough to keep the one he inherited.
更多独家洞察尽在 nextfin.ai.
