Lithuania's new coalition parties find common ground on weed, same-sex partnerships

By bne IntelliNews November 8, 2020

Lithuania’s conservative Homeland Union–Lithuanian Christian Democrats (HU-LCD), the Liberal Movement and the Freedom Party, the political parties in talks on a centre-right coalition, agreed on November 6 on a power-sharing draft deal to be signed on November 9.

If signed, the deal will, first of all, commit the partners to "supporting the coalition government led by HU-LCD’s Ingrida Simonyte and acting in accordance with this agreement and the government's programme".

The partners will also commit themselves to human dignity and human rights protection, transparency and the highest standards of political ethics, quality legislation, a value-based foreign policy and freedom of the media.

The coalition's top priorities include a national agreement on education, a Green Deal, empowering the most vulnerable groups in society, ensuring the quality and accessibility of health services, inclusive culture and its accessibility, strengthening the independence of municipalities, and high-quality and efficient public administration.

The partners will also seek to introduce electronic voting as a pilot project in the 2023 municipal elections, and/or in the 2024 parliamentary elections in the special constituency for expatriates, according to the draft document.

The coalition's near-term tasks and measures include managing the coronavirus situation, revising investments plans for 2021 and beyond, ensuring an absolute blockade of Belarus' unsafe Astravyets nuclear power plant, and preparing for a referendum on dual citizenship.

Certain measures on which the partners now differ, but commit to making efforts to adopt and implement them "within a reasonable period of time" are placed in a separate category.

These include legislative amendments to ensure the decommunisation of public spaces, allow using all Latin-based characters to spell names in their original form on the main page of ID documents, ban commercial fishing in inland waters, and provide the media with the Center of Registers' information on legal entities free of charge.

This category also includes ratifying the Istanbul Convention, decriminalising possession of small quantities of drugs, legalising "gender-neutral partnerships based on mutual responsibility and voluntary determination to assume rights and obligations", and lowering the age threshold for standing as a candidate in parliamentary elections to 21 years.

The three parties will have at least 74 out of 141 seats in the new Seimas, Lithuanian legislature.

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