Saturday's general election in Latvia yielded a victory for the country's centre-left coalition Harmony Centre. The coalition won the largest amount of seats in the parliament. But though this may seem like yet another promising victory for Europe's left following Thursday's election in Denmark, the facts on the ground are a bit more complicated than that.
Harmony Centre is a coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Socialist Party (the communists). The SP is essentially an ethnic Russian party, formed in 1991 to replace the Communist party after the country achieved independence from the USSR. Though the new state was formed around the Latvian ethnic and linguistic identify, in fact less than 60% of people in Latvia are ethnically Latvian. Almost 30% of the country is made up of ethnic Russians, some of whom moved there during the Soviet period but others of whom have lived there hundreds of years. The majority of the ethnic Russians cannot speak Latvian. In some of latvia's largest cities they constitute the majority of residents by far.
