How Latvia is governed under a constitution written in 1922

Why the Satversme was reinstated in stages

A constituent assembly convened on 1 May 1920 and adopted the Satversme in February 1922, a liberal constitution providing for a republic with a president and a single chamber called the Saeima. It held for twelve years. On 15 May 1934 Kārlis Ulmanis staged a bloodless coup, partly suspended the text and established a nationalist dictatorship that lasted until 1940, when the country was incorporated into the Soviet Union.

The restoration that began fifty years later ran in stages, and each stage moved another piece of the 1922 text back into force. The Supreme Council of the Latvian SSR, elected in the first democratic elections since the 1930s, adopted a declaration on 4 May 1990 titled "On Restoring the Independence of the Republic of Latvia". It carried the legal effect of a constitution. It reinstated four articles of the Satversme, the ones setting out the constitutional and legal basis of the state, and left a transition period between autonomy inside the Soviet Union and full independence.

That transition ended under duress. In January 1991 pro-communist forces attempted to restore Soviet power by force, and demonstrators kept Soviet troops from taking strategic positions. On 21 August 1991, after the failed coup in Moscow, the Supreme Council adopted the Constitutional Law on the Statehood of the Republic of Latvia. The law restored the political system under the Satversme of 15 February 1922 in full and made the laws of the USSR void in Latvia. Other states recognised the restoration of independence on the basis of that law, and the Soviet Union did so on 6 September 1991.

What followed was reconstruction. In autumn 1992 Latvia re-implemented large portions of the 1922 constitution, in spring 1993 the government took a census to determine eligibility for citizenship, and on 5 and 6 June 1993 the Saeima was elected for the first time since the 1930s, with turnout above 90%. Eight of the 23 registered parties cleared the 4% threshold then in force. The Popular Front of Latvia, which had led the independence drive and taken a 75% majority in 1990, won no seats; the centrist Latvian Way took a 33% plurality and formed a centre-right coalition with the Farmers' Union.

The Satversme has been amended since and remains in force. Its survival is why Latvian constitutional argument runs backwards so often: a question about what the state may do is answered by what the state was in 1922, and by what it is held to have remained through the decades when another state administered its territory.

How the Saeima makes and unmakes governments

The Saeima has 100 members, the number the 1922 text set, elected for four-year terms by proportional representation with a 5% threshold, and the ordinary election falls on the first Saturday of October. The chamber adopts the budget, approves the state's accounts, appoints the government and exercises control over it, and takes part in international co-operation. Bills may be initiated by the government or by members. A prime minister may ask the president to call an election before the term has run.

Executive authority sits with the cabinet. The president appoints a prime minister, who then chooses the Council of Ministers, and the whole cabinet has to be accepted by the Saeima. Under Article 59 of the constitution the chamber can remove a single minister or an entire government by a vote of no confidence.

No party has held enough seats to form a cabinet on its own, so every government has been a coalition, and coalitions have often been minority ones dependent on parties outside them. The election of 30 September and 1 October 1995 returned nine parties, the largest of them holding 18 of the 100 seats; seven weeks of failed attempts at a majority ended in a six-party coalition led by a businessman with no party. Consolidation followed slowly. Six parties won seats in 1998, and in 2002 the New Era Party, founded the year before, took 26 seats while Latvian Way and the Social Democrats dropped below the threshold.

Governments here end between elections more often than at them. In the summer of 1997 the newspaper Diena reported that half the cabinet and two-thirds of parliamentarians appeared to be in breach of the 1996 anti-corruption law barring senior officials from holding positions in private business, and the coalition demanded the prime minister's resignation on 28 July. On 5 December 2007 a prime minister resigned after repeated attempts to dismiss the head of the state anti-corruption bureau, who had been investigating his party. In November 2013 another resigned after a supermarket roof collapsed in Riga, killing at least 54 people.

Below the national level the country is a unitary state divided into 43 local government units, 36 municipalities and seven state cities, each with its own council and administration. Municipal councils have between 7 and 60 members depending on the size of the municipality and are elected for four years by proportional representation, on the same system as the Saeima.

What the president can and cannot do

The president is elected by the Saeima itself, by secret ballot and by an absolute majority, for four years and a maximum of two terms, under Articles 35, 36 and 39 of the constitution. The office is largely ceremonial. Its holder is formally commander-in-chief, signs treaties, represents the state abroad and appoints ambassadors and other senior officials, and every one of those powers is exercised on the binding advice of the prime minister, who is politically responsible for them under Article 53.

Four things belong to the president personally: proposing legislation to the Saeima, vetoing legislation, calling a referendum on a law, and nominating the prime minister. A fifth is built to be expensive to use. The president may call a referendum on dissolving parliament before its term is up; if the referendum passes, parliament is dissolved, and if it fails, the president has to resign.

In practice the office brokers. In 1995, with nine parties in the chamber and no majority available, President Guntis Ulmanis held limited constitutional powers and was credited with bringing the parties to the broad coalition they eventually accepted; the Saeima re-elected him in June 1996 to a further three-year term. In 1999 it elected Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, a compromise candidate with no party affiliation, born in Riga in 1937 and settled in Canada during the Soviet occupation, and re-elected her in 2003. In January 2009, after severe riots at the parliament building in Riga, President Valdis Zatlers gave the parties an ultimatum: agree constitutional amendments on the dissolution of the Saeima, or he would dissolve it by the end of March. He nominated a new prime minister on 26 February.

The electorate has its own instruments and has mostly found them blunt. Two referendums held in 2008, one on pensions and one on constitutional amendments that would have allowed voters to initiate the dissolution of parliament, both failed, in the middle of the worst political crisis since independence was restored.

Who the citizenship law recognises as Latvian

On 19 March 1991 the Supreme Council passed a law guaranteeing equal rights to all nationalities and ethnic groups, and equal rights to work and wages for all permanent residents. Citizenship was a separate question, and it was settled the other way. The Popular Front had advocated citizenship for every permanent resident. What was adopted in 1991 followed the principle of state continuity instead: citizenship was renewed for those who had held it on 17 June 1940, the day of the occupation, and for their descendants, regardless of ethnicity.

The consequence was arithmetic rather than intent. Most people who had settled in Latvia during the Soviet period, and their children, had never been citizens of the republic, so they had to naturalise as any other foreign national would. The citizenship law was finalised in the summer of 1994 and its current edition was adopted in 1998, after debate and pressure from Russia and the European Union. Naturalisation requires conversational Latvian, an oath of loyalty, renunciation of a former citizenship, five years of residence and a knowledge of the constitution. Excluded categories include those who settled after retiring from the Soviet Army, former employees and informers of the KGB and comparable foreign services, and members of the Communist Party and certain affiliated organisations who acted against the Latvian state after 13 January 1991. By November 2005 about 109,000 people had applied for naturalisation and about 103,000 had been granted citizenship.

A separate status was created in 1995 for former USSR citizens holding no other citizenship, and it is temporary by design. Latvia's non-citizens hold permanent residence by law, carry a non-citizen passport, and enjoy equal protection at home and abroad; the difference from citizenship is the right to vote in state and municipal elections and the right to work in the civil service or in posts tied to national security. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees treats the status as distinct from statelessness, since the rights attached to it are wider than those of the 1954 convention on stateless persons. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs recorded 113 stateless persons in the country in its account of integration policy updated in July 2026.

The share has fallen steadily. Non-citizens were close to 30% of the population in 1996 and 290,660 people, or 14.1%, in 2015. Of a population of 1,845,096 at the start of January 2026, citizens accounted for 87.9%, non-citizens for 8.7% and citizens of other countries for 3.4%. Amendments in 2013 simplified naturalisation, and a law passed in 2019 ended the granting of non-citizen status to children, so that from 1 January 2020 a child born to two non-citizen parents is a Latvian citizen at birth unless the parents choose another citizenship for it. In 2011 the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities urged Latvia to allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections.

How Latvian became the sole state language

Latvian is the only state language. Livonian is recognised in law as the language of the indigenous population and Latgalian is protected as a historic variant of Latvian; every other language is foreign for the purposes of the state language law. Two parliamentary parties, Harmony Centre and ForHRUL, asked for official status for Russian, the first language of 26.9% of inhabitants at the 2011 census.

Education is where the policy has been contested hardest, and the sequence is long. The schooling system Latvia inherited in 1991 was almost entirely segregated, with separate Russian and Latvian systems running separate curricula. A new Education Law in 1998 began the transition. Since 1999 public universities have been barred from teaching in languages other than Latvian, with exceptions for linguistics, some international projects and non-budget groups, and the law provided for Latvian-only instruction in public high schools from 2004. After large-scale protests in 2003 and 2004 organised by the Headquarters for the Protection of Russian Schools, that provision was amended to require at least 60% of the curriculum in Latvian. The 2018 reform went further, and the Constitutional Court found it compatible with the constitution and with Latvia's human rights commitments, while the European Court of Human Rights found no violation of the right to education. From the 2023 and 2024 school year the transition to teaching in the state language alone runs at every level, ending in 2026.

The question reached the electorate once, and the answer was emphatic. On 18 February 2012 a constitutional referendum asked whether Russian should become a second official language: 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for, and turnout was 71.1%. Language requirements have since been extended into residence policy. Russian nationals who gave up Latvian citizenship or non-citizen status must pass an A2 Latvian test to renew a residence permit, and in 2025 letters ordering them to leave were issued to 841 people who had not met the requirement.

What the courts were rebuilt from

The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature, and its reconstruction started before independence was restored. During the awakening of the late 1980s, judges regularly released detainees whom the militia had taken from demonstrations, the prosecutor's office of the Latvian SSR protested the decisions, and the Supreme Court declined to revoke them and terminated the cases. The court's plenary session also asked that the sentences under which inhabitants of Latvia had been repressed be declared unlawful and the people rehabilitated.

The Supreme Court of the Latvian SSR was renamed the Supreme Court of the Republic of Latvia in 1990, and Gvido Zemrībo, its chief justice since 1985, was asked on 16 May 1990 to build the court of the restored republic out of it. On 11 March 1991 the plenary session adopted a decision on the independence of the judiciary that set out international standards for adjudication for the first time. On 8 April 1991 the judges were sworn in wearing robes and insignia made to the pattern of the Senate of Latvia, the pre-war court, which is the same act of continuity the constitution performed, carried out in cloth.

The system that emerged has three instances: district courts, regional courts and the Supreme Court. Judges' appointments are confirmed by parliament and are irrevocable except on the decision of the Judicial Disciplinary Board or the judgment of a criminal court. Justices of the Supreme Court serve life terms.

Constitutional questions go to a separate court. The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Latvia was established in 1994 and began sittings in 1996, its justices confirmed by an absolute majority of the Saeima in a secret ballot for ten-year terms. It rules on whether laws and international agreements conform to the constitution and whether national law complies with agreements the state has signed, which is how the education reform, the language regime and the citizenship rules have each been tested without being put to a vote again.

Which alliances the restored republic joined

Withdrawal came before accession. Latvia and Russia signed a troop withdrawal agreement on 30 April 1994, with the assistance of United States president Bill Clinton, and Russian forces left by 31 August 1994. Several hundred technical specialists stayed to staff an OSCE-monitored phased-array radar station at Skrunda until 31 August 1998. Latvia joined the United Nations on 17 September 1991, the Council of Europe in February 1995 and the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1999.

The European Union question went to a referendum on 20 September 2003, and 66.9% of those voting were in favour. The vote divided along ethnic lines: an estimated 84% of ethnic Latvians voted yes and 91% of ethnic Russians voted no, in a country where a large minority could not vote at all. Accession to NATO followed on 29 March 2004 and to the European Union on 1 May 2004. Latvia entered the Schengen Area on 21 December 2007, adopted the euro on 1 January 2014 and joined the OECD on 16 June 2016.

Regional co-operation runs on a separate track and predates all of it. Latvia works with Estonia and Lithuania through the interparliamentary Baltic Assembly and the intergovernmental Baltic Council of Ministers, and with the Nordic countries through the Nordic-Baltic Eight and the Council of the Baltic Sea States. Riga hosted a NATO summit in 2006, and Latvia held the presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2015.

Defence and relations with Russia have moved together since 2022. On 21 April 2022 the Saeima passed amendments to the law on defence financing providing for a gradual increase in the defence budget to 2.5% of gross domestic product over three years. Latvia withdrew its ambassador from Moscow and expelled Russia's ambassador in January 2023. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Latvia a flawed democracy in 2022, an assessment that sits alongside a functioning electoral machine and a register of residents, roughly one in eleven of them as of January 2026, who take no part in choosing the parliament that governs them.