Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: European and national election resultsThe year 2004 was a period of intense political scandal in Lithuania that led to the first impeachment and then removal of a country's president in the history of Europe.It was also a year of three elections starting with the first ever Lithuanian European Parliament (EP) elections and an early presidential election, and ending with a parliamentary general election.And last but not least, it was the year when Lithuania entered into the European Union (EU) and NATO.Political turmoil and hopes that politics in Lithuania might become more stable and predictable prevailed in 2004.The decision to hold the EP elections on 13 June was taken by the Lithuanian Seimas at the end of 2003 along with the passage of a new electoral law.Lithuanian lawmakers chose a proportional party list system in which 13 members are elected in a single multi-member constituency.All registered political parties have the right to present lists of between 5 and 26 candidates.A party that receives a minimum of 5 per cent of the vote is able to win representation.In Lithuania, 2.6 million people were eligible to vote in the European elections, but less than half of that number did so; the voter turnout reached only 48.38 per cent.Still Lithuania demonstrated relatively high voter turnout compared to just 45.5 per cent EU-wide, and substantially higher compared to the average of 31.1 per cent in the eight former communist countries that joined the EU as new members on 1 May 2004.Still this was largely due to the fact that Lithuanians were casting ballots for a successor to the impeached president, Rolandas Paksas.However, the turnout decreased in comparison with the last national elections held in 2000, when it was at 58.62 per cent of eligible voters.Many commentators observed after the European elections that the low turnout among other new EU states and in Lithuania indicated that their endorsement of EU accession in referendums did not necessarily mean approval of the democratic participation of the EU's members in the decisionmaking process as an ideological principle.The low voter turnout confirmed
Author: Algis Krupavicius
Institution: Kaunas University of Technology
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4237247335