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Europe|Party Whose Leader Is Known for Antisemitism to Join Lithuanian Government
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/world/europe/lithuania-coalition-antisemitism.html
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A new coalition includes a party led by a politician notorious for antisemitic remarks, another blow to the longstanding refusal by Europe’s mainstream parties to join with those seen as extremist.
Andrew Higgins writes about political, economic and cultural issues in Europe’s formerly communist eastern flank.
Nov. 8, 2024
Europe’s fractious and increasingly fragmented politics shattered another taboo on Friday, when a mainstream party in Lithuania announced that it was forming a coalition government with a populist party led by a politician notorious for antisemitic statements.
Western embassies in Lithuania have been deeply alarmed by the prospect of such a coalition, and the move is certain to alarm the Baltic nation’s NATO allies, Israel and Jewish groups.
It will be particularly difficult to swallow for Germany, which is leading NATO’s efforts to strengthen Lithuania’s defenses by sending it a brigade of nearly 5,000 troops, the first open-ended foreign deployment of German troops since the defeat of the Nazis in 1945.
The new coalition resulted from a parliamentary election last month in which the opposition Social Democrats finished first with 52 seats — far ahead of the governing conservatives, but short of the 71 seats needed for a majority. To form a government, they reached out to smaller parties in the hope of securing a majority.
On Friday, the Social Democrats’ deputy leader, Gintautas Paluckas, who is on course to be prime minister, said his party had concluded an “agreement in principle” on a coalition that includes Dawn of the River Neman, a new party that the American Jewish Committee, the global advocacy group, has denounced as “explicitly antisemitic.”
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