Latvia’s New President Wants a Clean Break With the Soviet Past

It’s the finale of the 25th Nationwide Latvian Song and 17th Dance Festival on July 8, the country’s uninspiringly named but widely loved national celebration. And, as is customary when a new president has been chosen by parliament, the celebrations are doubling as an inauguration day, opened by the old president and closed by the new one. The new one, and up until this point serving as Latvia’s foreign affairs minister, is Edgars Rinkevics. Representing the center-right New Unity party, he’s been an elected deputy in three parliaments and was the state secretary of the Ministry of Defense from 1997 to 2008. He’s also the first president in the EU or any NATO country who’s openly gay.

Rinkevics is 49 years old and was born in 1973 in Jurmala, a famous resort town in what was then part of the Soviet Union. He’s a symbol of a new mentality for the small Baltic country, a clean break from the so-called “Soviet mindset.” That’s not just, or even mostly, because of his sexuality, but also his staunch support of Ukraine and his strongly held position that Latvia is, and historically has been, a Western nation, instead of just a transit hub between the East and the West.

In his role as the foreign minister, Rinkevics has focused on strengthening Latvia’s role within NATO and the EU, looking to show that the nation of under 2 million people is a trustworthy partner in global affairs. Although Latvia is a parliamentary republic, and the president is a diplomatic and ceremonial figure rather than the head of government, Rinkevics’s role serving as a pragmatic unifier of the ethnically divided Latvian society and promoter of these Western values.

To put this into perspective—his main opponent in the race was Uldis Pilens, an architect and entrepreneur with close ties to Russian businesses, supported by the more conservative wing of the Latvian parliament. The conservatives are mired in their own internal conflicts between their personal business interests with Russian oligarchs and their voters’ understanding of a socially conservative Latvian national identity.

Here, the president-elect’s sexuality comes into play. Latvia has had major issues with approving any progressive civil partnership laws, let alone equal marriage. The Saeima—the Latvian parliament—has been ignoring judgements by the Latvian Constitutional Court, and the majority of deputies, elected from primarily conservative, right-leaning parties, even staging a walkout from a parliamentary session to disrupt quorum so that they wouldn’t even need to debate this issue. This caused a massive uproar in Latvian society—including people who traditionally hold anti-gay views, because this wasn’t a debate—something that both sides of the argument wanted to happen, with evidence-based argument—but an outright refusal to do their jobs as elected representatives of the people.

There’s a desire among much of the public to get rid of the Soviet cultural legacy, where homosexuality was illegal and considered by many to be dirty, mostly through the influence of the ever-present prison culture. Although no official polling data on this is available because traditional politicians choose to not even touch the matter, this year’s Pride was attended by an extraordinarily large number of non-LGBTQ people who just came out to support the movement. With the election of Rinkevics, social change has finally reached national politics.

Another closely related issue is women’s rights, another area where Latvia has been stuck in the past. The Istanbul Convention has still not been ratified in the country. Unfortunately, it took a tragic event for this attitude to change: a brutal murder of a woman by her ex-husband in the city of Jekabpils. The perpetrator had been stalking and threatening his former wife for months before the attack. Latvian police were legally unable to react to this and provide any assistance, with the country’s prosecutor-general even stating in an interview that the victim’s lawyer was to blame for not taking enough action to protect her.

That set the tone for the first public statement that Rinkevics made as the new president-elect, stating, “The tragedy in Jekabpils is the negligence and responsibility of many state institutions, any attempt to blame the victim or her lawyer for what the state failed to do is unacceptable, this also applies to the prosecutor’s office,” thus showing his willingness to criticize governmental institutions and make a stance for his political and ethical beliefs. He reaffirmed this position in an interview with me, for my podcast The Eastern Border, stating that: “it is important to move our country away from post-soviet mentality” and have a strong focus on “the expansion of civil liberties which have been somewhat neglected in Latvia, due to our tragic past within the Soviet Union.” The idea of leaving the Soviet past behind, while still learning from it, seems to carry a great weight with the new president.

Then there’s the ever-looming question of Russia, Latvia’s onetime colonial ruler. As foreign affairs minister, Rinkevics has always taken the clear stance that whatever the difference in size, the Baltic country will not yield to threats and pressure, and will not accept being treated as anything but an equal partner in any negotiations. He’s made it clear that he considers Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime to be the prime threat and the most likely opposition to NATO.

Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the new Latvian president has taken a strongly pro-Ukrainian position and been instrumental in Latvian efforts to provide as much help as possible to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and the Ukrainian armed forces. He also tries to act as an interlocutor between the Western countries and Kyiv, fostering mutual understanding when cultural or political differences threaten a rupture between allies.

Rinkevics stated in an interview to Latvian Public Radio that: “The West must focus on weakening Russia as much as possible, but the outcome of the war will primarily be determined by the Ukrainian soldiers on the front line.” His view is that the democratic world should not fear Russia’s collapse, but arm itself with strategic patience and maximum endurance—and be prepared to handle the problems that would emerge, from the safe management of nuclear weapons to the establishment of a post-war order. This mediation process is a very demanding, ambitious, and delicate task—but Rinkevics’s past experiences in diplomacy mean that he should have enough expertise to at least make a decent effort with good chances of success.

Rinkevics’s experiences explain his approach. He was born in 1973 in the Latvian resort town of Jurmala—which, during the Soviet era was considered the fanciest place in the whole USSR to vacation. Even today, many Russian oligarchs have villas there, and rich exiles who’ve left Russia to escape Putin’s regime and the ongoing conflict often pick it as a home base. Growing up there let him observe the Soviet elite, the new class that ruled from Moscow but spent its free time in relative luxury.

But by the time he was in college, Latvia was an independent nation, and those years were spent at the University of Latvia, in the faculty of history and philosophy where he got his bachelor’s degree. After that, he got his master’s degree from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, now known as Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, a part of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Finally, he received a Ph.D. in political science and international relationships from the University of Groningen.

This combination of understanding of the Soviet—and later Russian—political elite, together with his ties to the West during his studies in the United States, forms the basis of Rinkevics’s worldview—he is a man of both worlds but with his eyes set clearly toward the West. His sexual orientation also plays a part—in the Soviet Union, homosexuality was a criminal offense, punishable by up to five years in prison on paper, and often longer in practice.

His career has been as diverse as is his education. Latvia’s size means that young, educated people can take powerful roles from early on. In 1995, a 22-year-old Rinkevics began at the Ministry of Defense as a senior policy officer. Shortly after, in 1996, he assumed the role of director of the Department of Defense for a period of six months. Following this, he served as deputy state secretary for defense policy until May 1997. Upon leaving that post, he took on the position of acting state secretary, and by August of the same year, he was appointed as the state secretary in the same ministry.

In February 1998, Rinkevics assumed leadership of a Latvian work group responsible for bilateral defense and military matters under a commission implementing a partnership charter between the Baltic States and United States. Between 2002 and 2003, he served as a member of the delegation for Latvia’s NATO accession negotiations, holding the position of deputy head of delegation. Additionally, from 2005 to January 2007, he held the position of the head of the Office for the Organization of the Meeting of NATO Heads of State and Government. In October 2008, Rinkevics transitioned from his role as state secretary to become the head of the president’s chancery, a position he held until July 2011.

On Oct. 25, 2011, Rinkevics began his political career, assuming the role of a nonparty-affiliated (a rare case in politics, as normally parties nominate their own members for executive positions, but Rinkevics was not a member of any party at the time—he was just deemed competent enough to be selected for the job) foreign affairs minister in Valdis Dombrovskis’s government—serving under the prime minister who had been successful in dealing with the 2007 economic crisis. In January 2012, he joined the ranks of the newly created Reform Party, headed by the ex-President Valdis Zatlers, whose political basis was focused on opposing the “Russian money”—the rich businessmen, tied with Putin’s regime, who at the time had a significant influence in Latvian politics.

Rinkevics showed his competence and abilities when, after Dombrovskis resigned, he continued to serve as foreign minister in Laimdota Straujuma’s government. In May 2014, Rinkevics transitioned to the Unity party, together with most of the members of the Reform Party. That did not change the electoral opinion about him, and in autumn 2018, Rinkevics was elected to the 13th Saeima on the list of his new party—“New Unity” alliance. In January, he was yet again confirmed as foreign affairs minister in the government of Krisjanis Karins.

The general view is that throughout his political career, Rinkevics has demonstrated consistency and competence. His tenure as foreign minister extended beyond a single government, as he continued to hold the position under the administrations of both Straujuma and Maris Kucinskis. Rinkevics is one of the few genuinely liked and respected politicians in Latvia. In the 2022 parliamentary election, he received the highest number of supporting direct votes (35,072) among all candidates. His success and popularity, despite being openly gay in the traditionally conservative Latvian society, shows that he’s able to deal with difficult situations, operate well under stress, and has a respectable amount of courage.

It seems likely that the new Latvian president will take the country to an even more pro-Western direction—and attempt to heal divisions within Europe between East and West. As he told me: “It’s not enough to get rid of Lenin’s monuments that were around us, when we were under the Soviet occupation—the hardest one to get rid of is the one in people’s heads.”