Lietuva in brief - 2011-12-01

  • 2011-11-30

If Lithuanian parliamentary elections were held at the end of October, only four political parties would get seats in the Seimas, a survey by the public opinion and market research company Baltijos Tyrimai shows, reports ELTA. The lucky ones to enter the Seimas would have been the Social Democrats, the Labor Party, the party Order and Justice, and the Liberal Movement and the Conservatives with the Christian Democrats. The Lithuanian Social Democratic Party would have been supported by the highest number of residents (19 percent), the Oct. 20-28 poll shows. The Labor Party would have received votes from 15 percent of the respondents aged 18-84. The party Order and Justice would have been favored by 11 percent. Among those polled, 6 percent would have voted for the ruling Liberal Movement and Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS-LKD). Other parties needed more support to reach the necessary 5 percent threshold.

Russia’s threats to deploy missiles in Kaliningrad should be received seriously and NATO should convince Russia not to act so aggressively, Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said on Nov. 24, reports ELTA. He also said he was not surprised by the plans of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan to establish a Eurasian economic union by 2015. He said that some regional leaders still felt nostalgic about the imperial past, which prompted them to establish such unions. He recalled that there had been such attempts before, but they turned out to be failures. On Nov. 18, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, three countries with less-than-stellar records of being competitive in the global marketplace, agreed to establish a Eurasian Union, modeled on the EU, by 2015. Medvedev last week warned again that Russia would deploy missiles in Kaliningrad if the U.S. did not make concessions over its missile shield in Europe.