Seemingly pleased with his party’s fourth-place showing and his zoological metaphor (repeated from the night before), Kols was setting out a series of “red lines.” Namely, the political forces with which the nationalist party would refuse to form a governing coalition. “We are polar bears and the Progressives are penguins - in the wild their paths essentially don’t cross,” Rihards Kols, a parliamentarian from the National Alliance party told Latvian television the morning after the country’s parliamentary elections last October. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox. This article first appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. For the Beet, Deep Baltic editor Will Mawhood recounts how the Progressives’ slow but steady rise has shaken up Latvia’s long-standing political divisions. As it happened, right-of-center parties weren’t the only beneficiaries of these shifts: the Progressives, a social-democratic green party, passed the five-percent electoral threshold for the first time and scooped up 10 parliamentary seats. Support for some parties espousing Euroskeptic and anti-NATO platforms simply collapsed, and Russian-speakers scattered their votes among various political groupings, leaving the once-popular Harmony - a purportedly center-left party representing Latvia’s Russian-speaking minority - out in the cold. Analysts argued that Latvians sought continuity amid the fallout from Russia’s war against Ukraine. During the elections in October, incumbent Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš’s center-right New Unity party came out on top with 19 percent of the vote. The coalition negotiations had dragged on for more than two months. Last December, three Latvian political parties came together to form a new government.
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