Lithuania held local elections on Sunday, electing municipal councils and mayors for 60 municipalities.
Twenty-six municipalities have elected mayors in the first round of voting, including in Kaunas City, while 34, where no candidate secured more than 50 percent of the vote, are heading into runoffs on March 18.
In Vilnius, Valdas Benkunskas, of the conservative Homeland Union (TS-LKD), will face Artūras Zuokas, of the Freedom and Justice party, in the runoff vote, having secured 31 and 22 percent of the vote, respectively.
Mykolas Majauskas, an independent candidate who recently split from the TS-LKD, came in third with 11 percent, followed by the Freedom Party’s Tomas Vytautas Raskevičius with 10 percent.
In the 51-member City Council, the conservatives also won most seats, 19, followed by Freedom and Justice with 9. The liberal Freedom Party of the outgoing mayor Remigijus Šimašius which dominates the outgoing council will also have 9 members.
Meanwhile, Lithuania’s second city Kaunas re-elected Visvaldas Matijošaitis, who secured victory with almost 60 percent of the vote. His closest rival, former health minister Aurelijus Veryga of the Farmers and Greens Union, got 13 percent of the vote.
Matijošaitis’ political committee United Kaunas also won 26 seats, a secure majority, in the city’s 41-member Council. The conservative TS-LKD will have the second-biggest group in the council, 8.
Municipality-level political committees are allowed to run in local elections alongside national parties.
In Klaipėda, Lithuania’s third biggest city on the Baltic coast, Arvydas Vaitkus, running with the political committee Loyal to Klaipėda, and Audrius Petrošius of the TS-LKD will head to the runoff (with 24 and 21 percent of the vote respectively). Meanwhile, the city’s incumbent mayor Vytautas Grubliauskas was left fifth and will have to leave the post after having served three terms.
Vaitkus’ political committee also secured most seats, 8, in Klaipėda’s 31-member city council. Freedom and Justice as well as the conservatives won 7 each.
Overall, the Social Democrats are leading nationally with 18 percent of all votes, followed by the conservative Homeland Union (TS-LKD) – which currently heads the national government – with 16 percent.
The Farmers and Greens Union, which is the biggest opposition party in the national parliament, got 9 percent of the vote in the local elections, followed by the Liberal Movement, 7 percent.
The Democratic Union ‘For Lithuania’ (6.6 percent), a new party led by former prime minister Saulius Skvernelis who parted ways with his former allies in the Farmers and Greens Union, was next in line.
While voter turnout was below 50 percent, it was the highest turnout for local elections in two decades, according to the Central Electoral Commission: 39.56 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls on Sunday and another 9.41 percent voted early, bringing the total turnout to 48.97 percent.
In 2019, it was 47.9 percent, while in 2015, when Lithuania introduced direct elections of mayors, 47.18 percent of eligible voters came to vote. In 2011, the turnout of local elections was 44.08 percent.
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