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Th e F a i l u r e o f t h e Con s e r vat i v e P r o j e c t…
tion of Restoration of Independence on 11 March 1990. The election was overwhelmingly
won by the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDDP), the erstwhile Communist Party
of Lithuania.
The defeat of
Sąjūdis
signified three things: dissatisfaction with the period of economic
hardship (partly due to natural economic processes of the transitional period, and partly
to the Soviet economic sanctions following Lithuania’s breaking away from the Soviet
Union); yearning for the economic and social security of the Soviet period, for whatever it
was worth; as well as the irritable protest against
Sąjūdis’
political, administrative and eco-
nomic reforms which were meant to secure a democratic, pro-Western political regime in
Lithuania and to promote a capitalist economy based on private ownership and individual
initiative. The protest was neatly summarized in two slogans coined by the ex-Communist
left:
Sąjūdis
and its leader, Vytautas Landsbergis, were blamed for political “witch-hunts”
(i.e., de-Sovietization of the political system) and for “wrecking the
kolkhozes
” (state-
owned Soviet collective farms) through restitution of land to its rightful owners.
Sąjūdis’
parliamentary rout was compounded by the defeat of Stasys Lozoraitis, a pro-
Western and pro-democratic candidate, in the presidential election in 1993. Instead, Al-
girdas Brazauskas, the leader of the ex-Communists, became the first president of the
recently restored independent Lithuania, thus securing ex-Communist control over the
whole government apparatus. This brought the first “
nomenklatura
spring,” soon dubbed
“the Lithuanian syndrome,” as the pattern of the ex-Communist comeback spread itself
over other East European countries in a short period.
With the ex-Communist LDDP challenging Lithuania’s pro-Western and pro-capitalist ori-
entation, while advocating closer ties with Moscow and condemning the destruction of So-
viet-era institutions, Lithuania’s political future had never seemed so precarious since the
restitution of independence three years before. This prompted the need to consolidate the
right-of-center, pro-Western and pro-democratic political forces, and the Homeland Union
was founded inMay 1993. It soon established itself as the natural leader of the political right,
and most of the
Sąjūdis
candidates in the parliament joined the Homeland Union faction.
The ex-Communist LDDP, on the other hand, fairly quickly became mired in corrup-
tion and inefficiency. Its foreign policy was characterized by indecisive leaning towards
the West while trying to flirt with Moscow. In domestic policy, concern with the for-
tunes of the common people and with safeguarding national property, loudly proclaimed
at the election, was replaced with a series of corrupt privatizations of national assets and
with promotion of the interests of large businesses based on the former Communist Party
structures of power.
Blatant lack of concern with the common good and public opinion, the eruption of a series
of corruption scandals, and a barely improving economic situation could not but lead to
a certain cooling off of the typical LDDP electorate: the rural and urban poor, Russian
and Polish minorities and Soviet-era sympathizers (who statistically tended to coincide
with those who lost most as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet system in social,
economic and political terms). As a result, very little of the LDDP electorate turned up to
vote in 1996. This and the slight increase in the right-of-center electorate (bolstered by the
ambitious and somewhat populist Conservative electoral program), meant a decisive de-
feat for the LDDP in the 1996 election, where it received only twelve parliamentary seats.
