They used to work together in one way or another. Since the collapse of "Harmony" – once the leading party for Latvia's Russian-speaking voters – four political groups are now competing for what's left of its supporters in the upcoming parliamentary elections in October. One is the faded old brand trying to reinvent itself, and the former allies who split off to build careers of their own.
In May, the Baltics experienced a perfect storm of events capable of fuelling public anxiety. There were repeated emergency alerts about Ukrainian drones entering airspace, some of them hitting an empty oil depot in Latvian town close to the Russian border and one being shot down by NATO air force in Estonia. Vilnius, including the government, was ordered to go to shelters. Latvia experienced power outages.
Sanctioned Russian oligarch Pyotr Aven has been visited in Latvia by a high-ranking priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, who at the time represented its interests in Hungary, according to information available to Re:Baltica. Hungary regularly lobbies for Aven's removal from the European Union (EU) sanctions list.
The fight against wind turbines and imaginary mosques, stories of stolen elections – in the local elections, Estonian populists used the same themes as their Latvian counterparts.
Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) was expected to become a tool that would force social media giants like Facebook and TikTok to follow their own rules and make the online space safer. However, an experiment reveals that, in practice, platforms often treat user complaints about illegal content as a formality. In the Baltics, they respond almost exclusively to regulators’ requests, if at all.
Elon Musk's Grok uses Kremlin propaganda sources most frequently in its responses. The most neutral so far is Google's chatbot Gemini.