Laurynas Kasčiūnas, current chair of the parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defence (NSGK), is slated to become Lithuania’s next defence minister. His colourful political past contains anti-EU sentiments, as well as the flirtation with extreme nationalists and Europe’s far-right.
Anti-EU rally
Kasčiūnas started his political career in 2000 when he joined the National Democratic Party of Lithuania which espoused extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic views. Before, in 1999, he became the chair of the Young National Democrats which, among other things, opposed Lithuania’s aspirations to join the EU.
“I’m not satisfied with a federal European Union where Lithuania’s status will be equal to a German federal land. And I’m also not satisfied with the fact that any general technical part of EU law is higher than the most respected norm of the constitution of the Republic of Lithuania,” Kasčiūnas spoke on LRT TV in 2003.
At the time, 24 percent of Lithuanians said they would vote against EU accession, while about half were in favour. As the Lithuanian government worked to convince the population of the benefits of EU membership, 20-year-old Kasčiūnas called it “Europsychosis”.
Later, Kasčiūnas did not talk much about his time in the far-right party. On Tuesday, at the time of writing, he was unreachable by phone.
“We are talking about the years when I was 19 or 20, or maybe school days. This was a path of search,” he said in an interview with LRT.lt three years ago, adding that today he would “definitely” vote in favour of EU membership but would question what kind of membership it should be.
After graduating from Vilnius University with a degree in political science, Kasčiūnas became involved in more moderate political activities, started teaching, and in 2015 was appointed interim head of the Eastern Europe Studies Centre, one of the first and most influential thinktanks in Lithuania, run by Vilnius University and the Foreign Ministry.
In 2011, he joined the conservative Homeland Union–Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS–LKD) party and was elected to the Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, in 2016. In 2009–2012, he worked as a foreign policy adviser to the then Seimas Speaker Irena Degutienė.
Radical past
During his national democratic days, Kasčiūnas served as a deputy to the party chair Mindaugas Murza (he has since changed his last name to Gervaldas). In 2003, Gervaldas was fined for hate speech after his party organised an anti-Semitic rally during a town festival in Šiauliai.
“Laurynas went to the Homeland Union after his marriage, I think, and that’s how we broke things off,” Gervaldas tells LRT.lt about his former associate. Kasčiūnas himself has not spoken about his relations with the extremist party.
According to Jurgis Razma, a long-time member of TS–LKD, Kasčiūnas’ past is not an obstacle to his candidacy for the defence minister’s position.
“When a politician belongs to a more radical organisation in his youth, it does not follow that he will remain the same throughout his life. I think that in later life, those views may normalise, and radicalism no longer manifests itself. We have to look at how the politician is acting at the moment,” he said.
“He has become a highly visible politician [...] thanks to his energy and knowledge,” Razma added.
Flirt with far-right
Even after distancing himself from the National Democratic Party, Kasčiūnas continued to flirt with the far-right and made no secret of his sympathies for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Germany’s AfD party, and former US President Donald Trump.
In 2012, Kasčiūnas and his colleagues initiated the Lithuanian–Hungarian Forum. Not until the war in Ukraine did Kasčiūnas and the other initiators of the forum sign a letter distancing themselves from Orbán.
In 2018, Kasčiūnas invited representatives of Germany’s far-right AfD party to visit Lithuania. Kasčiūnas said at the time he wanted the meeting for academic purposes. He later claimed the Germans were the ones to request the visit, and he only signed the invitation. The visit was cancelled after it was condemned by the TS–LKD leadership.
Kasčiūnas, who has served as the NSGK chair since 2020, is also one of the most prominent anti-immigration hawks in Lithuanian politics. He was a vocal champion of the controversial pushback policy in response to irregular migration via Belarus.
In 2022, the Coalition of Human Rights Organisations asked the Seimas Commission for Ethics and Procedures to evaluate Kasčiūnas’ statements that they deemed dehumanising. Talking about the migrants from the Middle East and Africa, Kasčiūnas claimed that they came from cultures where “the value of children is by no means high. They manipulate them and often strike at our sensitivities”.
Following the announcement of Kasčiūnas’ candidacy for defence minister, public figures also pointed out his stance against LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage. In 2016, he signed a petition calling to ban an LGBTQ+ pride event in Lithuania.
On Tuesday, the leader of the liberal Freedom Party Aušrinė Armonaitė stated that the party “dissociates” itself from Kasčiūnas’ candidacy. To this, Kasčiūnas responded that he would “defend every citizen of Lithuania, regardless of their views”.
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