A week that said a lot: In the space of a few days, President Gitanas Nausėda showed us two things: how he handles criticism, and where he is looking for applause.

On 3 November, President Valdas Adamkus turned 100. The country gathered at the National Opera and Ballet Theatre to honour him. The sitting President was not there. He was on a working visit to Germany, which his office said had been agreed in the spring.

This was not just any anniversary. Adamkus remains the most respected public figure in the country. In a June 2026 poll, 79% of Lithuanians viewed him favourably, more than any other public figure, sitting President included. A refugee who rose to senior office at the US Environmental Protection Agency, he came home and served two terms as President, 1998–2003 and 2004–2009.His first term changed the country’s trajectory. When he took office, Lithuania was a second-tier candidate for the EU and an aspirant to NATO. By the end of that term, EU accession talks were concluded and the NATO invitation was in hand. Lithuania joined both in spring 2004.

Plenty of people found that hard to understand. A head of state could simply have said, “I got this wrong.” Instead, the Presidential Office’s first public response was to hit back, saying it is not for “influencers” to teach the President respect for Adamkus The apology came only later, in an interview, followed by a personal visit to Turniškės.

That is a remarkably thin skin for a second-term president. And it set the tone for what came next.

The referendum call

On 6 November, Nausėda told BNS that the Seimas should call an advisory referendum on the concept of family. He added that he would vote for the proposed amendment, which would write into the Constitution that family relations arise only from a marriage between a man and a woman, motherhood and fatherhood.

And the timing could hardly be worse: in eight weeks Lithuania takes over the EU Council presidency, with democratic resilience among its stated priorities, and the President wants us to spend it holding a referendum against the very European courts we’ll be chairing alongside.

He said the Constitution seems clear to him, and that the trouble starts with the interpretations of “clever” lawyers. He also said he does not understand why people are so afraid of public opinion.

The draft resolution has been stuck in Seimas committees since April. It envisages a vote alongside the municipal elections in March 2027.

This is a sharp turn. Not long ago, speaking to the Great March for the Defence of the Family, the same President asked whether the legal status of same-sex couples needed resolving at all, and answered that of course it did. Today he is lending the full weight of his office to a campaign meant to close that door in the Constitution itself.

Nausėda is in his second and final term. This looks less like policy and more like a swansong, played for a very particular audience.

Who’s the audience?

The referendum push follows, almost point for point, the agenda of Lithuania’s organised anti-gender movement.

The Laisvos visuomenės institutas (Free Society Institute) has campaigned for years against same-sex partnership, the Istanbul Convention and reproductive rights. One of its board members, Kristina Zamarytė-Sakavičienė, has been Vice-Minister of Justice since October 2025, appointed from the Farmers’ quota. That is the ministry responsible for drafting the partnership rules the Constitutional Court has demanded.

The Farmers, a junior coalition partner, recently urged the Social Democrats to bring the referendum back to the plenary and tied it to their support for next year’s state budget. A question of constitutional rights has become a bargaining chip.

None of this is unique to Lithuania. The playbook comes straight from the regional anti-gender network, with Poland’s Ordo Iuris as its best-known legal engine: when you lose in the courts, take minority rights to a majority vote. Croatia wrote a “man and woman” marriage clause into its Constitution by referendum in 2013. Slovakia (2015) and Romania (2018) tried the same, and both votes failed on turnout. Hungary’s 2022 “child protection” referendum also fell short. Each time, the campaign itself did the damage: months of state-amplified hostility towards LGBT+ families.

The President now joins that chorus. Whether by conviction or calculation, he is giving the anti-gender movement what it has never had in Lithuania: the endorsement of the head of state.

The law has already spoken

The President says the Constitution is clear to him. But in Lithuania, the official interpreter of the Constitution is not the Presidential Palace. It is the Constitutional Court, and its rulings bind every institution, the President included. Dismissing them as the tricks of “clever lawyers” is not a legal argument. It is an attack on the rule of law.

The courts have been consistent:

The Constitutional Court has also made clear that even constitutional amendments cannot deny the innate nature of human rights. Rights are not a favour granted by the majority, to be withdrawn by a show of hands.

In other words, the amendment the President supports would collide with Lithuania’s own constitutional jurisprudence, with the European Convention on Human Rights, and with EU law. A referendum cannot make that collision go away. It can only make Lithuania look like a country that does not take its commitments seriously.

“Only advisory” is not harmless

The President stresses that the referendum would be advisory and non-binding. That is exactly the problem.

It would settle nothing legally. The courts’ rulings would still stand, and so would Lithuania’s obligations under the Convention and EU law. What it would do is put the dignity of thousands of Lithuanian families on the ballot, next to the choice of a mayor.

It would also guarantee months of campaigning in which LGBT+ people, their children and their parents are cast as a threat to the nation. Every country that has run this kind of vote has seen that rhetoric rise. The bill is paid not by the politicians who called the vote, but by the people it targeted.

Asking “why fear the people’s opinion?” sounds democratic. But a constitutional democracy does not put the rights of a minority up for a majority vote. That is precisely what constitutions and courts exist to prevent.

A different legacy is still possible

Presidents are remembered for their final acts. Valdas Adamkus is remembered as a statesman who anchored Lithuania in the West, and who understood that European values are not a menu to pick from.

Gitanas Nausėda still has time to choose his legacy. He can be the President who upheld the Constitution as the Constitutional Court reads it, and who defended Lithuania’s credibility in Europe. Or he can end his tenure as the most prominent voice of a movement that has lost in every court and now wants to win at the ballot box.

The Seimas should leave this draft resolution where it is. And the President, who swore to observe the Constitution, should remember that the rule of law is not a slogan for convenient days. It applies to the Presidential Palace too.