• In April, the authorities launched an investigation into municipal representatives’ alleged misuse of public resources intended to reimburse expenses they incurred while serving as councillors.1 Following the revelation that three incumbent ministers who had previously served on municipal councils may have fraudulently used the allocated funds,2 one of the implicated officials—Minister of Education, Science and Sport Jurgita Šiugždinienė – resigned, the Minister of Finance reimbursed the budget of the municipal council, while no tangible action has been taken by the Minister of Culture.3 Povilas Mačiulis, the president’s chief adviser, also resigned.4 After the scandal broke, TS-LKD chairman and Minister of Foreign Affairs Gabrielius Landsbergis said the party presidium would consider dissolving the governing coalition, which would have led to early parliamentary elections if a new government could not be formed.5 As the resignation of the government would have meant premature parliamentary elections and instability in the country in the context of the war in Ukraine and the approaching NATO summit in Vilnius, both the media and political experts criticized the idea.6 Finally, the prime minister apologized and said the government would remain in place.7
• In response to the aforementioned scandal, the Seimas introduced amendments to the Law on Local Self-Government that would both eliminate supplementary allowances for municipal councillors and raise their salaries.8 President Gitanas Nausėda initially vetoed the bill because it only provided for local government ethics commissions to investigate potential conflicts of interest among mayors and municipal councillors.9 Nausėda said the local commissions could lack objectivity and demanded that the Chief Official Ethics Commission (COEC) also investigate conflicts of interest.10 The Seimas acceded to the president’s veto and passed a version of the bill with the requested amendment11 , which the president signed into law in September.12 Although the Seimas seeking to increase transparency and accountability of intelligence agencies passed a law that established the Institute of the Intelligence Ombudsman in 2021, an ombudsman was not appointed until the spring of 2023.13 Apart from building the institution and assembling a competent team, the ombudsman will scrutinize intelligence agencies to ensure they respect human rights and investigate allegations of misconduct.14 Additionally, the Seimas recently established a parliamentary commission to examine the conduct of the State Security Department when it investigated members of presidential candidate Nausėda’s election team on his personal request during the presidential campaign in 2019. The commission will probe claims of a whistleblower State Security Department official, who accused Department’s leadership of unlawful gathering of information on individuals, potential unlawful interference in the 2019 presidential election process on behalf of the current President by the Department, and the subsequent violations of the whistleblower’s rights.15
• In July, Vilnius hosted the NATO Summit, which was one of the largest high-level political conferences ever held in Lithuania. At the summit, members discussed Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO, increasing military aid for Ukraine, defending NATO’s eastern flank, and the membership applications of Sweden and Finland.16
• Minister of Foreign Affairs Landsbergis clashed with the president over foreign policy. In the autumn, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalled Ambassador to the United Kingdom Eitvydas Bajarūnas after he was accused of bullying, harassment, and other serious misconduct.17 President Nausėda criticized the move and said an official investigation should have been conducted into Bajarūnas’s conduct before he was recalled.18 The president subsequently rejected several ministerial nominees for ambassador to Poland,19 although he said he still had confidence in Minister of Foreign Affairs.
• In 2024, Lithuania will hold parliamentary, presidential, and European Parliament elections, which will drive the political debate in the coming year. In May 2024, the first round of the presidential election will also include a referendum question on whether Lithuanians can maintain their citizenship if they also become citizens of one of Lithuania’s allies.
• As the center-right government entered its fourth and final year in office in 2023, tensions between coalition partners grew due to policy disagreements. Prospects for the legalization of civil partnerships for same-sex couples remained blurry at the end of the year.20 Lithuania is the only Baltic state that has not ratified the Istanbul Convention or adopted legislation on civil partnerships. Moreover, Freedom Party leader and Minister of Economy and Innovation Aušrinė Armonaitė publicly clashed with the prime minister over a watered-down tax reform bill, which Lithuania needed to pass to receive EU Recovery and Resilience Fund support.21
• Despite passing a few substantial laws, such as public service reforms and legislation that legalized official names and surnames with Latin letters,22 the government showed signs of fatigue and political parties began gearing up for the string of elections in 2024.

• During municipal elections held on March 5, the Social Democratic Party received the most votes and TS-LKD came second.23
• The municipal elections were the first elections held after the passage of electoral reforms in 2022, introducing the regulation of political committees and the number of terms for mayors. The chairperson of the Central Electoral Commission (VRK) declared that the elections were conducted smoothly.24 However, some VRK policies and decisions surrounding the municipal elections were criticized as unfair and ultimately led to the resignation of the VRK’s chairperson in March.25 The VRK removed three mayoral candidates and five party lists as not complying with the Electoral Code in February.26 Based on the conviction of Kęstutis Tubis in the case of influence peddling, passed by the Panevėžys Regional Court, and following the Court's clarification on the issues related to the execution of the conviction, the VRK has decided to cancel the registration of the candidate for the mayor of the Anykščiai district,27 when the election has started and the candidate has already made it to the second round of the mayoral election. After an appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania, the VRK's decision to remove the candidate from the election was overturned and the candidate won the mayor's post.28 Similarly, after the elections had already started, the VRK cancelled the registration of Dalia Štraupaitė, a candidate for mayor of Visaginas, in accordance with the verdict of the Panevėžys Regional Court.29 In April, the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania upheld the appeal of Dalia Štraupaitė, the mayoral candidate of Visaginas, and ordered the VRK to organise the second round of the mayoral elections in Visaginas again.30 The candidate lost the election in the second round in May.31 These situations can be interpreted as arising from loopholes or uncertainties in the Electoral Code, which entered into force in 2022. On the other hand, they also revealed that different courts may have different interpretations of the duties of the mayor and of the possibilities to restrict the right to be elected mayor after a conviction.32
• The VRK chair said that while no widespread irregularities were reported during the elections,33 there were a few instances of vote buying in some municipalities, including in Šakiai, where a district councillor resigned after prosecutors opened an investigation into vote buying.34 Another candidate who ran for mayor of Pagėgiai (and lost) became the target of a law enforcement investigation after he allegedly bribed voters.35 The VRK found a candidate guilty of bribing voters in gross violation of the electoral procedure, and the candidate renounced his mandate. 36
• Both political parties and political election committees (organizations formed for the election only) nominated candidates for the municipal elections in 2023. According to the 2022 amendments to the Law on Political Organizations that introduced stricter registration requirements for candidates, the previous possibility of registering a list of candidates for the elections as electoral committees has now been replaced by the requirement to formally establish a political committee before the official campaign period in order to run for both European Parliament and local elections. The law states that at least 0.1 percent of a municipality’s population must sign a petition to form a political committee for local elections, while 1,000 signatures are required to form a committee for European Parliament elections.37 The VRK reported a significant decrease in the number of registered political committees in 2023 due to the more stringent regulations.38 In the 2023 elections, 32 political committees participated, compared to 87 public committees in the 2019 elections.39 Although the new law reduced electoral competition, it also led to a more explicit implementation of the principle of accountability to voters: whereas, unlike the provisional electoral list, political committees continue existing after the elections. Despite the restrictions, political committees secured nearly 14 percent of the vote and 185 municipal council seats.40 The mayors of Kaunas, Šiauliai, and Panevėžys, who ran with their respective committees, were re-elected for a third term.41 In Druskininkai, the mayor secured re-election for the seventh time,42 while the mayor of Rietavas has been in power for more than 20 years,43 revealing the lack of competition in these municipalities.

• In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in undocumented migrants from Africa and the Middle East, high inflation, and the ongoing impact of the Russia-Ukraine War, civil society has demonstrated cohesion, high levels of mobilization, and considerable strength and resilience since 2020. The largest civic initiatives in 2023 supported Ukraine and its citizens. To support the “Strong Together” initiative, Lithuanians donated generators to heat Ukrainian shelters and public buildings.44 To mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Lithuanian National Radio and Television worked with Blue/Yellow, Laisvės TV, 1K Fondas, and Strong Together to organize a campaign that raised more than €14 million to buy 16 radars that helped protect critical Ukrainian infrastructure and featured drone detection capabilities.45 These campaigns were supplemented by countless private, public, and citizen-led initiatives. CSOs organized summer camps for Ukrainian children in Lithuania and a solidarity marathon between Bakhmut and Vilnius.46 Thousands of Ukrainian flags were also raised in Vilnius during the NATO Summit to showcase support for Ukraine’s membership bid.47
• CSOs also organized prodemocracy demonstrations for Belarus, although political elites and the security services have claimed that the Belarusian diaspora through infiltration of Belarusian security agencies poses a threat to political stability.48 In general, the right of CSOs to organize and demonstrate was respected notwithstanding the cause. In June, thousands gathered to support the LGBT+ community at the Vilnius Pride parade.49 Teachers’ unions also organized two strikes in late 2023. Strikers demanded the government keep previous promises to increase wages, decrease the workload for teachers, and assign a smaller number of pupils per classroom.50 In April, around 50 people demonstrated in front of the president’s office to protest amendments to the State Border Security Law that allowed authorities to expel migrants crossing the border from Belarus.51 In October, activists organized several pro-Israel rallies after the attack by Hamas and around 100 demonstrators marched in Vilnius to support the Palestinians affected by the war in Gaza.52
• In 2023, some conservative CSOs, such as the National Families and Parents Association, Lithuanian Parents Forum, and Preparation for Family Association, attacked a new school program known as “life skills” that discusses LGBT+ people and human sexuality. The CSOs accused the program, which is part of the core curriculum at secondary schools, of “ideologizing” education and promoting LGBT+ worldviews. 53 Protests and counterprotests have been organized, with major NGOs pledging their support for the program and stressing the need to provide students with accurate and age-appropriate information about sexuality, sexual health, and reproductive health.54 The initiative to install a memorial for the poet Justinas Marcinkevičius, a pivotal figure in the national revival movement of the late 1980s who the regime favored during the Soviet era, generated controversy.55 The pace of removing Soviet monuments and changing of street names associated with the Soviet period hastened in 2023, after a law dedicated to desovietization of public areas came into effect in May and obliged municipalities to reassess the names of monuments and public spaces across the country. 56 It provoked renewed public discussions around the recent history of Soviet occupation and the shortcomings of transitional justice measures in recent decades.57
• A survey conducted in late Fall 2022 found that Lithuanians’ belief in the effectiveness of civil society had diminished and their perception of the risks of activism had grown, causing Lithuania’s “Civic Power Index” score to decline.58 More than two thirds of Lithuanians joined the efforts to support Ukraine and record numbers boycotted (27 percent) or bought (23 percent) certain goods or services based on their moral or political convictions.59 Nearly 14 percent participated in CSOs or social movements and 13 percent took part in a demonstration or a protest. However, the increase in respondents who did not know how they would respond to a political, economic, or local emergency was the main cause of the score’s decline. The number of people who said they would take action in those situations also decreased. At the same time, the survey found a slight decrease in respondents’ perception of civil society’s impact on public life, while the perceived impact of politicians increased.60
• At the end of the year, the president’s office presented the long-awaited State Defense Plan, which included plans to mobilize civil society in case of war.61 Though the plan is based on the principle of universal participation, the drafting process was criticized for being too abstract and not inclusive enough.

• The media landscape has notably shifted in the last 10 years. First, the parliament’s investigations aimed at regulating and politicizing the public television network LRT ended when the new government took power following the 2020 elections. The new government has also shown greater tolerance when the media criticized public officials. Second, revenues for online media outlets and television have increased over the past few years. The government also increased funding for the LRT.62
• Although the current environment for journalists in Lithuania is considered favorable, a number of challenges persist, such as the risk of media consolidation, the influence of politics and business on the press,63 low public confidence in the media (only 28.5 percent of respondents said they trust the media in one survey),64 and the decline of regional media outlets.
• The parliament developed a number of bills in 2023 to tackle some of these issues. In 2023, the Seimas passed a law that established the Media Support Fund to address the sector’s financial challenges. The fund replaced the Foundation for the Support of Press, Radio, and Television. While the foundation had 21 shareholders, the fund has just three— the Ministry of Culture, the Association of Public Information Ethics, and the Association of Cultural Periodicals.65 The main governing body of the fund is the 10-member Fund Council, which has a different composition than the foundation’s comparable body.66 There are no government representatives on the new council, whose members are nominated by higher education institutions that train journalists and media organizations. Another important principle of the new model is that the national broadcaster does not receive grants from the fund because it is now fully funded from the state budget. The fund was officially registered in September and Ruslanas Iržikevičius, editor-in-chief of the news portal The Lithuania Tribune and CEO of Baltoscandia Media, was appointed its head.67 Although the Internet Media Association, the Lithuanian Journalists’ Union, and the Association of Cultural Periodicals supported the new model,68 media outlets and their associations strongly criticized the fund for having a smaller budget than expected and pointed out that the national broadcaster received a larger funding increase than the fund.69
• After a bill to reform the Commission of Ethics in the Provision of Information was postponed in 2022,70 a revised bill was adopted in May that restructured the existing model of media self-regulation. The Ethics Commission is now comprised of nine representatives of media organizations, one representative of the national broadcaster, and three representatives of the public, who are appointed by the Media Council under the Ministry of Culture. In addition, it also introduced a term of office: members of the Commission are appointed for a three-year term of office and may serve for no more than two consecutive terms.71 The commission deals with breaches of professional ethics, complaints from individuals about possible breaches of the Code of Ethics of the Lithuanian Public Information by producers and disseminators of public information, and disputes between producers and disseminators of public information regarding breaches of the Code.72 The media has largely supported the new law.73
• The election of the director general of the national broadcaster attracted much attention in 2023.74 After two tie votes among the 12-member council that caused a lengthy delay, the council finally re-elected incumbent Director General Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė on the third vote in October.75 After the second tie, the council considered and ultimately decided against making the vote public.
• During the NATO summit in July, Lithuania faced numerous cyberattacks and some internal NATO documents were leaked on Telegram. The hackers, using the handle “From Russia with Love,” claimed that they accessed sensitive security details about the summit, including the names of the officials in charge of security, the planned transportation routes for national delegations, and the summit’s security systems.76 Moreover, mobile network users saw an increase in spam and phishing messages.77 Lithuania successfully countered the cyberattacks thanks to citizens’ high digital literacy and successful anti-disinformation campaigns.78

• Local council and mayoral elections were held on March 5 without major incident, with the exception of the controversy surrounding the VRK’s decision to disqualify two mayoral candidates and a court’s subsequent decision to reinstate their candidacies (See Electoral Process).
• The local elections gave political parties an opportunity to assess their level of support ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for 2024. Turnout reached 49 percent, a slight increase from the 48 percent turnout in the 2019 local elections. 79 Turnout was highest among older voters: 59 percent of 65- to 74-year-old voters voted in the elections. 80 Only 33 percent of voters between 18 and 24 turned out, the lowest of any demographic group.81
• In 2022, the parliament passed amendments to the Local Self-Government Law that granted mayors the power to veto decisions of municipal councils, unilaterally appoint key officials, and oversee the municipal budget.82 The law also established a three-term limit for mayors.83 Although some experts believed that direct mayoral elections would have increased voter engagement and facilitated more competition, 38 out of 60 mayors were re-elected in 2023,84 demonstrating the entrenched power of incumbents in local government.
• The Social Democratic Party candidate, Robertas Duchnevičius, was unexpectedly elected mayor of Vilnius in March.85 Duchnevičius secured his narrow win with the support of center-right parties such as TS-LKD, the Liberal Movement, and the Freedom Party.86 The Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Christian Families Alliance, which is a powerful political force on the Vilnius District Council, has already clashed with the new mayor on key policy questions.87
• Education reforms affecting municipal schools have had an impact on local government. The Ministry of Education, Science, and Sport has been implementing the Millennium Schools Program at 150 schools, which aims to make education more equitable for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds but also to merge or close schools with low enrollment as part of its plan to restructure the school system.88 Opposition members of parliament challenged the ministry’s authority to close and merge schools at the Constitutional Court, which ruled that the government must first pass legislation to establish clearly defined criteria before it can restructure the school system.89 In September, the parliament passed amendments to the Education Law that established the new criteria in line with the court’s ruling, including minimum and maximum class sizes.90

Judicial Framework

• In 2023, the Lithuanian justice system again scored at or above average on the EU Justice Scoreboard, which measures the effectiveness and independence of the judiciary in EU member states.91 President Sigitas Goda and three justices were appointed and sworn into the Constitutional Court in 2023.92 One of the new appointees, Stasys Šedbaras, was previously a sitting parliamentarian and the chairman of the Committee on Legal Affairs. President Nausėda and the parliamentary opposition challenged his nomination due to concerns about the “court’s politicization.”93 The European Commission also noted that the selection process for some judges could be more transparent.94 On the other hand, amendments to the Courts’ Law came into effect in 2023 that made judicial appointments more transparent by establishing reserve lists for judicial vacancies, merging administrative courts, and assigning cases according to claimants’ addresses. The Constitutional Court also clarified the guidelines for dismissing higher court judges, reaffirming the role of the Judicial Council.95 After the civil service reform was finally introduced, judges’ and prosecutors’ salaries also increased, which is expected to make these positions more attractive to legal professionals and reduce judicial corruption .96 However, the low salaries of court staff and legal aid providers remains a source of concern, since they are not competitive compared to positions in the private sector an is a reason for understaffing
• In January, the Department of Prisons was restructured and became the Prison Service, which oversees all eight detention facilities in Lithuania. This centralization of previously autonomous detention facilities marked the third phase of prison reform. However, corrections officers opposed the reform and said it was executed too hastily disregarding the differences in officer workload and infrastructural capacities throughout the prison system.97 Discontent with the restructuring led many prison staff to resign.98
• The Constitutional Court made several rulings with wide-reaching implications in 2023. Firstly, in June, the court ruled that it was unconstitutional to detain undocumented migrants in dedicated foreigners’ registration centers, even in an emergency. In 2021, the number of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa trying to enter Lithuania from Belarus spiked.99 This surge of migrants led Lithuania to start temporarily detaining migrants at the registration centers. In 2022, the EU Court of Justice ruled that Lithuania’s asylum policy was incompatible with EU law.100 Following suit a year later, the Constitutional Court ruled the policy unconstitutional because it prohibited the individual evaluation of asylum applications and enabled the government to detain asylum seekers en masse without a decision by competent authorities.101 Although the Ministry of Interior ended the restriction of movement for most migrants to comply with the ruling and proposed amendments for individually examining asylum applications,102 Lithuania still faces criticism from both international institutions and CSOs for a securitized response to migration. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) took on several cases in 2023 in which asylum seekers accused the Lithuanian government of mistreatment.103
• Among other notable decisions, the Constitutional Court ruled that the government’s COVID-19 immunity certificates were constitutional. The court stated that the government could treat those with certificates differently than those without them if it was in the interest of public health.104 The Constitutional Court also ruled that government restrictions on beauty and dental services during the quarantine period and the prohibition of meetings of more than two families or households in closed rooms were constitutional.105 Furthermore, in July the court found that official names could be written in the Latin alphabet without diacritic symbols.106 Besides families with mixed nationalities, the Polish minority, which long sought an opportunity to retain original Polish names in official documents, is the main beneficiary of these changes.
• The Constitutional Court is set for another busy year in 2024. Since the Seimas again failed to implement the 2021 ECtHR ruling on religious pluralism, which would make the ancient Baltic faith “Romuva” a state-recognized religion, the group is likely to again file an appeal with the Constitutional Court.107 In addition, the ECtHR found that the ban on providing LGBT+ information to minors contradicts European law, but the Seimas refused to amend the legislation.108 Thus, the case is likely to go to the Constitutional Court. Finally, the Constitutional Court accepted the parliament’s request to rule on whether the Istanbul Convention’s points on gender, including gender-based violence against women and non-stereotypical portrayals of gender roles in education, align with the Lithuanian constitution.109 The parliament also asked the Constitutional Court to rule on private pension funds and plaintiffs filed an appeal with the Constitutional Court after a Vilnius district court refused to register a same-sex marriage.110

• In a survey covering 2022 data, 10 percent of respondents reported paying a bribe, a slight increase from 2022. In addition, only 20 percent of respondents said they had paid a bribe in the previous five years (the lowest amount since 2007) and the proportion of citizens who knew where to report corruption increased from 50 to 56 percent. Nonetheless, most respondents still believed that a bribe was an effective way to solve problems (63 percent). The survey showed that national and regional hospitals were the institutions most likely to demand bribes.111 Corruption, along with high inflation, caused the shadow economy to grow by 2.7 percent in 2022, comprising 26 percent of GDP.112 Thus, corruption remains a central political and economic issue in Lithuania.
• In 2023, Zydrunas Bartkus’s five-year term as head of the Special Investigative Service (STT) ended. During his time in office, the STT became responsible for anticorruption investigations and the new law on corruption prevention was adopted, which enshrined corruption risk management and standards of conduct in public institutions, among other measures. The STT also initiated a number of educational initiatives during Bartkus’s term.113 These reforms have led to some recent progress, but experts have identified several areas for improvement, such as fighting nepotism, protecting whistleblowers, disclosing meetings between members of parliament and lobbyists, and data transparency.114
• In 2023, authorities began an investigation into municipal representatives’ alleged misuse of public resources intended to reimburse expenses they incurred while serving as councillors.115 The controversy caused a political crisis as Lithuania finalized preparations for the NATO summit in Vilnius. Under the law, a municipal council member could receive a monthly allowance to cover work-related expenses (such as office and telephone expenses). Each municipal council could determine the size of the allowance, the payment procedure, and the exhaustive list of eligible costs.116 Since councillors received very low salaries, monthly allowances were viewed as part of their compensation. In extreme cases, investigators found that councillors used more than 100 different credit cards to claim expenses. Although most of these allowances were modest, the scale of the problem caused public outrage. According to the STT’s investigation, which had covered 19 municipalities by the end of the year, 117 transportation and fuel expenses accounted for much of the allowances, despite the fact that municipal council meetings were conducted remotely during the pandemic and inter-municipal travel had been strictly prohibited.118
• In September, the director of municipal administration in Kaunas pleaded guilty to receiving a record-breaking bribe in exchange for approving expedited construction permits in the city. An investigation into alleged systematic corruption in the Kaunas municipality was also ongoing at the end of the year.119
• In April, the Vilnius Regional Court opened a corruption case against the previous president of the Lithuanian Business Confederation and the former president of the Association of Lithuanian Banks. The case examined corruption and influence peddling allegations involving members of the Seimas, who had attempted to block new taxes on the banking sector. As of the end of 2023, questioning of witnesses was still ongoing. Among other notable cases, the Court of Appeal announced its final verdict on the bribery and influence peddling case involving the MG Baltic group in November.120 In a watershed judgement, the Court of Appeal sentenced key figures including Raimondas Kurlianskis, former vice president of MG Baltic, and Eligijus Masiulis, former leader of the Liberal Movement, to six years and five-and-a-half years in prison, respectively.121 Additionally, Labor Party representative Vytautas Gapšys was sentenced to four and-a-half years in prison. The court also imposed financial penalties on the Labor Party, the Liberal Movement, and the MG Baltic group.122

Author: Jogilė Ulinskaitė, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Researcher at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, Lithuania. Žilvinas Švedkauskas is a Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Political Science, University of Tübingen, Germany, and Director of think-&-do tank OSMOS in Lithuania.