On the weakness of the political left in Lithuania

ENThis chapter provides a brief account of the political left in Lithuania against the historical background of the socio-economic transformation of a post-Soviet society. I will focus on the main political actors on the left, primarily on the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP), and highlight then ideological positions, social base, and electoral performance. This chapter argues that the absence of an influential political left in Lithuania is both a result of the specific context of post-Soviet transformation and of the position of the moderate centre left LSDP as the biggest actor on the Lithuanian left. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the situation in Lithuania is still much better compared to several other Central and Eastern European countries (for example Poland) where there are no politically and electorally influential centre-left parties (i.e., either social democratic or even left liberal) at all. I take the main principle for operating within bourgeois liberal democracy to be to ‘choose the least evil’, rather than to ‘stubbornly stick to the ideals of perfect socialism’. For this reason, the remaining institutions of Social Democracy, even if they betrayed the spirit of the Second International remain of great importance to preserve civility and the values of social justice today. [Extract, p. 196]