How Lithuania divided every office it built

Why the interwar republic shaped the compromise

Lithuania had already tried the parliamentary version of itself and watched it fail. The constitution adopted in August 1922 gave the country a Seimas elected by men and women for a three-year term, and that Seimas elected the president. The First Seimas was elected in October 1922 and could form no government, because its votes split evenly at 38 against 38, and it dissolved. The Second Seimas, elected in May 1923, was the only parliament of the interwar republic to serve a full term. Its successor, elected in May 1926, was deposed by a military coup in December of that year, which installed Antanas Smetona as president and Augustinas Voldemaras as prime minister.

What followed is the part Lithuanian constitutional argument still starts from. The Seimas was dissolved in May 1927. In May 1928 Smetona announced a provisional constitution without consulting it, and the powers of the president were vastly increased. When elections were finally held in September 1936, every party except the National Union had been eliminated, and 42 of the 49 members of the Fourth Seimas came from it. That assembly worked as an advisory board to the president, and in February 1938 it adopted a constitution granting the office more power still. Smetona ruled as an authoritarian leader until June 1940.

So when the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR proclaimed the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania on 11 March 1990, and the country faced writing a constitution instead of restoring one, the drafters worked from that memory. Proposals ranged from strong parliamentarism to a presidential republic with checks and balances modelled on the United States. Neither camp won. A semi-presidential system was settled by compromise and put to a referendum on 25 October 1992, the first general vote of the people since the declaration of independence, and it passed with 56.75% of the total number of voters in support.

How the president and prime minister divide power

The president is head of state, elected directly for a five-year term, with a maximum of two consecutive terms. The election runs on a modified two-round system whose rule changes with turnout. If half of voters take part, a candidate must win a majority of the total valid vote to be elected in the first round. If fewer than half take part, a plurality is enough, provided it reaches at least one third of the total vote. Where no candidate clears the bar, a runoff is held between the two leading candidates and a plurality decides it.

The office is substantial without being dominant. The president appoints the prime minister with the approval of the Seimas, then appoints the Council of Ministers on the prime minister's nomination, along with a number of senior civil servants and the judges of all courts. The president is commander-in-chief, oversees foreign and security policy, proclaims states of emergency, and considers the laws the Seimas adopts. Lithuanian presidents hold somewhat greater power than their counterparts in Estonia and Latvia, and more influence over foreign policy than over domestic policy.

The prime minister is head of government, appointed by the president and approved by the Seimas, and has 15 days from appointment to choose ministers for the president to approve across the 13 ministries. The office carries out the laws and resolutions of the Seimas and the decrees of the president, maintains homeland security, and conducts relations with foreign states and international organisations. In practice the division is by subject. The prime minister runs domestic policy and the president runs foreign policy, and neither writes the other's brief.

The seam between the two is where Lithuanian government has actually broken. The first prime minister proposed by Valdas Adamkus after he became president in 1998 lasted seven months before that government collapsed. In 2006 the arrangement failed from the other direction: the president declared no confidence in two ministers of the cabinet led by the former president Algirdas Brazauskas, and the cabinet resigned on 31 May 2006 instead of continuing.

Why a Lithuanian voter casts two ballots

The Seimas is a single chamber of 141 members serving four-year terms, filled by two different methods at the same election, in a system settled with the 1992 constitution. 71 members are elected in single-member districts, one seat each, decided locally. The other 70 are elected in a nationwide vote by proportional representation from party lists, and a list must take at least 5% of the national vote to be represented at all.

The result is a chamber holding two kinds of member. Roughly half the Seimas answers to a named district and can be turned out by the voters of that district alone. The other half owes its seat to a party list and to the share the party took across the whole country. A candidate beaten in a district can still enter parliament from the list, and a party with no district strongholds can still hold seats. Compare Slovakia, where the entire country is one constituency and no member of parliament represents a place.

Legislative power is shared as well as divided. The constitution vests it in both the Seimas and the Government, so the cabinet is a lawmaking body in its own right and the chamber is one source of binding rules among two.

The mixed method has produced swings instead of stable blocs. Voters have moved between right and left repeatedly since 1991, between the Conservatives led by Vytautas Landsbergis and the Democratic Labour Party, the renamed Communist Party of Lithuania, led by Algirdas Brazauskas. The Democratic Labour Party took a majority against Sąjūdis in 1992, and the Homeland Union took it back in 1996. The alternation broke in October 2000, when the Liberal Union and the New Union won the most votes and built a centrist coalition with smaller partners. Two later elections show how far a single cycle can move the chamber.

An agrarian party that had been small took 54 of the 141 seats in 2016, and lost most of that four years later. The chamber sitting now was elected for the 2024 to 2028 term.

Who chooses the judges of the Constitutional Court

The Constitutional Court decides whether the laws and other acts of the Seimas conform to the constitution, and whether the acts of the president and of the Government conform to the constitution and to the laws. It has nine justices. Each serves a single nine-year term, and one third of the bench is reconstituted every three years, so no single parliament ever fills the whole court.

The appointment rule is the clearest expression of the divided design. Every justice is appointed by the Seimas, and every justice comes from a slate somebody else drew up. The Seimas takes one appointee from the candidates proposed by the president, one from the candidates proposed by the Speaker of the Seimas, and one from the candidates proposed by the president of the Supreme Court. Three nominators, one appointing body, a bench refilled in staggered thirds.

The Law on the Constitutional Court, adopted on 3 February 1993, fixes the mechanics down to the calendar. Terms expire on the third Thursday of March of the relevant year. Each nominator must put its candidates to the Seimas at least six months before that date, and a justice whose term has run continues in office until a successor has been appointed and sworn in, so a deadlock cannot empty a seat. A justice who filled a vacancy and served up to six years of the remaining term may hold one further term, after an interval of three years. Otherwise nine years is the whole of it.

Standing to bring a case is divided the same way. The Government may challenge a law or another act of the Seimas. A group of at least one fifth of the members of the Seimas may challenge an act of the president, and the president may challenge an act of the Government. The ordinary courts may refer a question in any of the three categories when a case in front of them turns on it. A person may petition the court directly, once a decision taken under the challenged act has violated that person's constitutional rights, once every ordinary remedy including appeal has been exhausted, and within four months of the final court decision.

The rest of the judiciary sits outside constitutional review. The Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal head the ordinary courts, a separate system of administrative courts hears disputes with the state, and the judges of all of them are appointed by the president.

How the design removed a sitting president

Whether any of this is more than paper was settled in April 2004. Rolandas Paksas had defeated Valdas Adamkus in the presidential election of 2003. He was impeached in April 2004 for leaking classified information, and he left office by that route.

Impeachment runs through the same split. The Constitutional Court presents conclusions to the Seimas and to the president in the cases the constitution and the Law on the Constitutional Court define, and those conclusions are final and cannot be appealed. The Seimas then votes. Neither body completes a removal alone, which is what the drafters of 1992 were after: a head of state with a popular mandate, removable, and removable only where two institutions agree.

The office recovered quickly. Adamkus returned and served a second, non-consecutive term. Dalia Grybauskaitė was elected in 2009, the first woman to hold the office, and in 2014 became the first president to win a second consecutive term. She served until 2019.

Where power sits below the national government

Lithuania is a unitary state, so its division of power runs sideways between institutions and stops short of a federal layer. There is no regional legislature and no second chamber speaking for a territory. What exists below the national government is administration, and it has been reorganised from the top down since 2010.

There are three tiers. Ten counties divide the territory, 60 municipalities divide the counties, and more than 500 elderships divide the municipalities. The middle tier is the one that governs. Each municipality has its own elected council, chosen every four years where the term used to be three, and the council appoints the elders who run the elderships beneath it.

The top tier is a survivor without a job. County governors and county administrations were dissolved in 2010, which left the ten counties as lines on a map with no administration of their own. At the bottom the movement ran the other way. Mayors had been appointed by their councils, and since 2015 they have been elected directly by the voters of the municipality, which gave the head of a Lithuanian municipality the kind of personal mandate the president holds nationally, on a smaller scale.

Which alliances Lithuania has bound itself to

Independence was recognised widely on 6 September 1991, and Lithuania was admitted to the United Nations on 17 September 1991. The last Russian troops left on 31 August 1993. An application to NATO followed in 1994, membership of the World Trade Organization on 31 May 2001, and an invitation to the European Union in October 2002 with a NATO invitation a month after it. Both memberships took effect in 2004.

Two of these do the most to constrain what a Lithuanian government can decide. Adopting the euro on 1 January 2015 moved monetary policy out of national hands, so a government facing a downturn holds fiscal instruments and little else. Joining Schengen on 21 December 2007 removed the border controls with Latvia and Poland and left the frontiers with Belarus and with the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia as external borders of the European Union, policed on the Union's behalf.

Membership also brought the alliance home. The NATO summit was held in Vilnius on 11 and 12 July 2023, attended by heads of state and government of member countries and their allies.

What the divided design costs Lithuania

Nothing in the arrangement guarantees a quiet government. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Lithuania a flawed democracy in 2024. No party dominates, so every government is a coalition, and a coalition has to be renegotiated whenever a partner walks. The Seimas replaced its own Chairman mid-term on 11 April 2006, when Artūras Paulauskas was removed and Viktoras Muntianas elected in his place. Prime ministers turn over with the parliamentary cycle: Andrius Kubilius was appointed on 27 November 2008 after the Homeland Union won, and Algirdas Butkevičius replaced him in December 2012 after the Social Democrats won the most seats.

The countervailing gain is that no institution can be taken whole in one election. A party that wins a parliamentary majority still faces a president elected on a separate timetable and a Constitutional Court two thirds of whose bench was appointed before that election happened. A president with a large popular mandate still needs the Seimas to approve a prime minister, and still cannot legislate alone. The rules that make Lithuanian politics slow are the rules that make it hard to capture, and the country's own twentieth century is the argument for paying that price.

Scale keeps the arithmetic tight. 2,860,002 people lived in Lithuania as of 1 January 2023, and 581,475 of them in Vilnius. A chamber of 141 members for a population that size means small electorates in the 71 districts and a short distance between a voter and a member, and it means the loss of one coalition partner can end a government. What the compromise of 1992 bought was a state where that loss changes the government without touching the constitution.