wh y w e l o s t
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ciferous, even if ineffective opposition to Lithuania’s integration into NATO (one of them
now is a European MP).
Most of these concerns are, and for the time being will remain, unsubstantiated, let
alone voiced in public, despite tacit confirmation from the security sources and the
increasingly worried tone of the annual Security Report issued by the Lithuanian State
Security Department. If, however, at least some of these reports prove to have been
true, Lithuanian Conservatives will be proven to have played on a far from level politi-
cal field at the time when Lithuania’s political future and its integration with the West
were being decided.
Nor were the Conservatives helped by the development of Lithuania’s political party struc-
ture. The establishment of the New Union, or the Social Liberal Party, by Paulauskas, the
candidate narrowly defeated in the 1997 presidential election, and the increasingly suc-
cessful performance of the New Union at the polls in 1999, raised the specter of populism
once again. The New Union’s program offered,
inter alia
, to slow down Lithuania’s integra-
tion with NATO and the EU.
As the New Union’s unavoidable parliamentary victory was looming, President Adamkus’
idea to avert the implied threat to Lithuania’s Westward orientation was to harness the
New Union to a few parties with impeccable pro-Western and pro-democratic credentials:
the Liberal Union, the Center Party and the Modern Christian Democrats, a revisionist
group which splintered from the Christian Democratic Party. Thus in early 2000 a politi-
cal neologism in the form of the slogan of “New Politics” was floated. The “New Politics”
was also supposed to raise the standards of political life towards greater openness and
morality, and was expected to heal the growing rift between society and the political elite.
Among the many parts of this political
meccano,
only one – the Liberal Union – had
anything resembling a consistent political ideology. When this new political derivative
secured the majority of parliamentary seats in 2000, it was Paksas, by then a liberal, who
was entrusted with the formation of the inherently unstable and short-lived government
which was to disintegrate eight months later.
The president’s venture into political engineering had a twofold result. On the one hand,
the two-party system that had seemed to be the axiom of Lithuanian parliamentary poli-
tics until then was irreparably fractured. Political entities started further multiplying at the
populist end of the spectrum with the foundation of the Liberal Democratic Party in 2002
and the Labor Party in 2003.
On the other hand, this uneasy marriage of the broadly left-wing, socially-minded New
Union with a center-right Liberal Union committed to free market values spelt the begin-
ning of the end for ideology-based grouping of political parties. Henceforth party ideolo-
gies would recede into the background as the primary factor distinguishing parties from
one another, to be replaced by considerations of expediency and power-sharing arrange-
ments. Nor was ideology any longer the selling point of political parties’ programs. One
may recall, by contrast, that in 1996 the Center Union was losing voters’ support because
its ideology was too indistinct. Likewise, the New Union founded in 1998 saw as its pri-
mary task the creation of a credible party ideology (admittedly, this was not an easy task
for a personality-based political force). By 2000 the political tide had turned in the oppo-
site direction, and the role of ideology was on the ebb.
