The parliamentary elections in Lithuania on 11 and 25 October reassembled the previous ones of 2016, but with different outcomes and with different recurring trends. Just as in 2016, the “Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats” (TS-LKD), uniting conservatives, Christian Democrats, and moderate nationalists, won the first round of the elections with 25 percent of the vote. The main difference from 2016 came in the second round of the latest elections, when TS-LKD won the cities and triumphantly took back its stronghold, the city of Kaunas, where they lost in 2016 to the Union of Farmers and Greens (LVŽS).
After another eight years in opposition, the TS-LKD is now returning to power. Typically, the conservatives have won in troubled times (the bankruptcy of large Lithuanian banks in 1996, or the economic crisis in 2008). This time, however, the problems in Lithuania are moderate compared to the rest of the European Union, as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the country’s economy has so far been quite limited.
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