In the same week of September 2026, the parliaments of Latvia and Lithuania both advanced proposals to narrow constitutional protection for families. Neither proposal is law yet. Both are timed to elections, and both aim at the same target: the legal recognition of same-sex couples and their children.

For LGBTIQ people across the Baltics, this is not a coincidence of calendars. It is a coordinated shift in political strategy, from blocking equality in ordinary law to making it impossible at the level of the constitution itself.

Latvia: “only two sexes” moves forward, days before the vote

On 24 September, nine days before Latvia’s 3 October parliamentary election, the Saeima sent a constitutional amendment from the opposition party Latvija pirmajā vietā (LPV) to committees. The text would declare that the state recognises only two sexes, man and woman. It would protect the status of mother and father while refusing support for what it calls “artificially created genders”. It would also state that no other legally established relationship can be equated with marriage.

That last clause is aimed squarely at Latvia’s partnership registration, which same-sex couples have only recently been able to use.

The vote was 42 to 25. Support came from United List, the National Alliance, the Union of Greens and Farmers, LPV and Stabilitātei! New Unity and the Progressives voted against. New Unity’s faction leader Edmunds Jurēvics called the proposal a dangerous provocation about problems that do not exist, designed to divide society and pressure the courts.

The trend matters more than the single vote. In January 2025 the Saeima refused to even send the same idea to committees, 37 for and 43 against. Twenty months later it passed. Adoption is still far off: a constitutional amendment needs three readings and a two-thirds majority of MPs present. But a proposal that was once a fringe gesture now commands a parliamentary majority on the eve of an election.

Lithuania: a referendum to rewrite Article 38

On 23 September, the Seimas Committee on State Administration and Local Authorities voted 7 to 2, with one abstention, to back an advisory referendum alongside the 2027 municipal elections. Voters would be asked a yes-or-no question: should the Constitution state that family legal relations arise only from the marriage of a man and a woman, motherhood and fatherhood?

The initiative, signed by 63 MPs and led by Vytautas Sinica, already passed its first Seimas stage on 9 April, by 50 votes to 35 with 6 abstentions (notably, 20 Social Democrats voted in favour of the anti-rights referendum). A final plenary decision is still to come.

Its authors say openly what it is for. Sinica argues that the Constitutional Court’s rulings effectively oblige Lithuania to legalise partnership, including for same-sex couples, so the choice is either to do that or to change the Constitution. The referendum is designed to make the second option politically unavoidable.

The legal objections are serious and come from inside the state:

• The Seimas Legal Department concluded that the proposed change would itself contradict the Constitution, EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights, and that the question is unclear and misleading.
• Former Constitutional Court president Dainius Žalimas said holding the referendum would violate the Constitution and the ECHR.
• MPs from several parties, including Social Democrat Birutė Vėsaitė, called it a political trick for the municipal elections. The Social Democrats’ own leader, Mindaugas Sinkevičius, acknowledged it would mainly drive turnout, not solve demographic problems.

One playbook, two countries

The two proposals differ in form, but they follow the same script.

• The courts are the target. In both countries, constitutional courts have recognised that families exist beyond marriage. Rather than legislate to meet those rulings, politicians are trying to overrule them at the constitutional level.
• Elections set the timetable. Latvia’s vote came days before polling day; Lithuania’s referendum is tied to the municipal elections. Family is being used as a mobilisation tool, and LGBTIQ people are the backdrop.
• “Democracy” is the wrapper. Supporters present a referendum as letting the people decide. But fundamental rights of a minority are not meant to depend on a majority vote, which is exactly why constitutions protect them.

There is also a familiar template. In 2020, Russia wrote “marriage is a union of a man and a woman” into its constitution, in the same referendum that allowed Vladimir Putin to stay in power until 2036.

Since then, anti-LGBTIQ messaging has become a standard weapon in Russia’s hybrid campaign against Western democracies. The EU’s disinformation task force, EUvsDisinfo, names “Gayropa” as the most common narrative: Europe as a morally degenerate realm that exports an “LGBT agenda” as a new form of colonialism, threatening the “natural family”. The same analysis warns that election periods are when these narratives are pushed hardest.

The aim is not to win an argument about sexuality. It is to provoke strong emotions on divisive issues and to erode public confidence in democratic institutions. In Moldova, pro-Kremlin channels framed a local Pride march as an EU attack on national and Christian values. At home, Russia’s Supreme Court went further in 2023 and declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist.

Many of the Baltic politicians behind these initiatives are sincerely and loudly anti-Kremlin. That is precisely the point. Moscow does not need to fund this agenda when its narrative is already being adopted by local actors. Every time Baltic parliaments treat LGBTIQ families as a threat, they move closer to the model of society our countries have spent three decades leaving behind.

What is at stake

Lithuania remains one of the few EU member states with no legal recognition of same-sex couples in any form. Estonia has had marriage equality since 2024, and Latvia only recently opened partnership registration. If either proposal succeeds, the Baltics would split further, and Lithuania would lock itself out of equality at the highest legal level.

The consequences would be concrete. Couples would remain without inheritance rights, hospital access or shared legal parenthood. Children raised by same-sex parents would remain legally invisible to the state.

Both countries would also put themselves on a collision course with their European commitments. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that states must provide some legal framework for same-sex couples under Article 8 of the Convention. The Court of Justice of the EU requires member states to recognise same-sex marriages concluded elsewhere in the EU for free-movement purposes. A constitution written to deny this would not end the debate; it would move it to Strasbourg and Luxembourg, at the state’s expense.

LGL’s position

LGL calls on members of the Seimas to reject the advisory referendum resolution when it reaches the final vote. A question that the Seimas’s own lawyers consider unconstitutional should not be put to voters at public expense.

We call on the Government and Parliament instead to do what the Constitutional Court has already made clear is required: adopt a partnership law that protects all families, including same-sex couples and their children.

We stand in solidarity with Latvian LGBTIQ organisations and with every Latvian voter heading to the polls on 3 October. What happens in Riga will be watched in Vilnius, and the reverse is just as true.

Rights are not a reward handed out by the majority. They are what keeps a democracy from turning on its own citizens.