Saeima rejects no confidence motion against Culture Minister Logina

RIGA - The majority of Saeima members today turned down the National Alliance's motion of no confidence in Culture Minister Agnese Logina (Progressives).

Former Culture Minister Nauris Puntulis (National Alliance) earlier told LETA that he would urge the parliament to pass the vote of no confidence in Logina because of her "willingness to refuse to implement Saeima's decisions".

Last September, Saeima approved a new National Security Concept. It stipulates that from 1 January 2026, public media will only produce content in Latvian and other languages of European culture.

At the time, Logina said Russian-language public media could have a conceptual role in Latvia, and the question was about details, deadlines and possible transitional phases.

"It does not even matter whether it is the National Security Concept or anything else, it is a decision taken by the parliament that any minister has to implement. To state publicly that the decision will not be implemented - such a minister should step down, especially in the current security situation," said Puntulis.

The Culture Ministry's Parliamentary Secretary Agnese Lace (Progressives) responded by saying that the National Alliance's members had been serving as culture ministers for more than ten years, during which time the National Alliance had the opportunity to resolve "these issues, which are so important for this political force this very year and so suddenly", which never happened.

Lace stressed that the Culture Ministry was committed to implementing the National Security Concept. The concept says that content produced by public media should be only in Latvian and other languages of the European culture, which means that not only content in Russian would no longer be produced by the media, but also content in, for example, Belarusian and Armenian. According to Lace, the contradictory nature of such a total ban on certain minority languages has also been pointed out by President Edgars Rinkevics, the Public Electronic Mass Media Council and the National Electronic Mass Media Council.

The culture minister has been "courageous enough" to make it clear that Russian, as a minority language in Latvia, should be represented in the public media, said Lace. At the same time, Logina agrees that the dominance of the Russian language needs to be reduced and this process is already under way, Lace added.