On 24 March 2026, a group of Lithuanian MPs – led by Ligita Girskienė, Vytautas Sinica and Audronius Ažubalis – registered a draft resolution proposing that a consultative referendum be held alongside the 2027 municipal elections, asking citizens whether they agree that Article 38 of the Constitution should explicitly state that “family legal relations arise only from the marriage of a man and a woman, motherhood and fatherhood.”

The initiators present this as an exercise in democratic participation, but its actual purpose is much narrower: to write same-sex couples and their children out of the constitutional concept of the family. It is worth recalling that the current Article 38 does not actually define what a family is – it only says that marriage is entered into by the free consent of a man and a woman, and that the family is “the basis of society and the State.” The substantive constitutional concept of the family has been developed over two decades by the Constitutional Court itself, which in its landmark ruling of 28 September 2011 held that the constitutional concept of the family “cannot be derived solely from the institution of marriage” and that family is grounded in the content of relationships, not their form.

The referendum initiative appeared not even a year after the Constitutional Court’s historic ruling of 17 April 2025 (Case No. KT21-N5/2025), which found that Article 3.229 of the Civil Code – restricting partnership to different-sex couples – was unconstitutional, and that the legislature’s 24-year failure to pass a partnership law had violated the principle of legal certainty. The Court explicitly stated that the Constitution does not permit lawmakers to enact rules that discriminate against participants in family relations on the basis of their sexual orientation, and opened the door for same-sex couples to apply directly to ordinary courts to have their partnerships recognised while the Seimas continues to stall on legislation. This ruling aligns with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights – in Fedotova and Others v. Russia, Buhuceanu and Others v. Romania, Maymulakhin and Markiv v. Ukraine, and Przybyszewska and Others v. Poland, the ECtHR has established a positive obligation on states to provide legal recognition for same-sex couples. In other words, the proposed referendum asks the public to “advise” the Seimas to violate Lithuania’s Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights all at once.

From an LGBTIQ rights perspective, however, this referendum is far more than a legal absurdity – it is a political signal that existing citizens can be turned into props in an election campaign. The point of constitutional democracy is precisely that the dignity, private and family life, and equality of a minority are not up for a majority vote – they are protected from shifting majoritarian moods. While the Seimas continues to drag its feet on a partnership law, couples  are forced to prove the existence of their own families in court, one case at a time. Asking them to additionally submit to a “consultative” vote on whether they even deserve to be called a family turns human rights into a popularity contest. That is not democracy – it is institutionally organised discrimination.

Update April 9 2026

On the evening of 9 April, the Seimas passed the referendum initiative (draft resolution No. XVP-1322) through the submission stage by 50 votes to 35, with 6 abstentions, and routed it to the Committee on Legal Affairs rather than the Committee on State Administration and Local Authorities, a telling choice, since the latter is the natural home for questions about organising a vote alongside municipal elections, while the former tilts the debate toward the constitutional text itself. Consideration (svarstymas) is provisionally scheduled for 21 May 2026.

What the raw vote count obscures is who actually signed the draft. The text is co-sponsored by Linas Kukuraitis, chair of the Union of Democrats “For Lithuania” (DSVL) parliamentary faction, a governing party that formally sits in the European Green Party, alongside Ligita Girskienė, chair of the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens–Christian Families Union (LVŽS-KŠS) faction and LVŽS deputy leader, and Remigijus Žemaitaitis, founder of Dawn of Nemunas. All three parties are in government. They are joined by conservative opposition MPs from the Homeland Union–Christian Democrats (TS-LKD), including former foreign minister Audronius Ažubalis, Dainius Kreivys, Valdas Rakutis, Arvydas Pocius and Dalia Asanavičiūtė-Gružauskienė, by the far-right Vytautas Sinica (National Alliance), and by MPs such as Ignas Vėgėlė, who earlier this term registered a separate bill to abolish the institution of partnership from the Civil Code altogether.

Liberals Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, Simonas Gentvilas and  Arminas Lydeka as well as social democrat Birutė Vėsaitė spoke against the initiative in the debate.

Three things will matter between now and 21 May:

First, whether the Legal Affairs Committee takes the April 2025 ruling seriously instead of working around it.

Second, whether the LSDP leadership openly breaks with its coalition partners on this text, rather than pretending it is not their problem.

And third, whether Lithuania’s European partners, who spoke out loudly when Dawn of Nemunas joined the government in late 2024, call this what it is: an attempt to put the dignity and family life of a minority to a public vote, at the very moment when European and Lithuanian courts have been ruling the other way.