Viktor Uspaskich, a businessman and member of the European Parliament, has reinstated his membership of the struggling Lithuanian Labour Party to take on the role of its interim chairman.
“The presidium tasked Uspaskich with temporarily fulfilling the duties until the party’s congress,” Rolandas Janickas, the Labour Party’s vice-chairman, told BNS after the governing body’s unexpectedly convened meeting in the town of Raseiniai on Tuesday.
Prior to this, MP Valentinas Bukauskas resigned as the Labour Party’s interim leader.
The party performed poorly in the recent presidential and European Parliament elections, leading to talks about its final demise. MP Andrius Mazuronis stepped down as the party’s chairman and later left it altogether.
The Labour Party’s council on Tuesday set up a negotiating group to seek out potential coalition partners for October’s parliamentary elections.
It did not name the parties with which it would consider joining a coalition.
“The Labour Party is alive and will continue. Personally, I do not seek any positions or mandates; the future of the party is what matters to me. I have received the council’s mandate to negotiate possible coalitions for the upcoming parliamentary elections,” Uspaskich was quoted in the party’s press release.
“Time is running out, so we must consolidate and seek consensus among Lithuania’s smaller political forces to form a coalition, but we also do not rule out the possibility of negotiating with major parties,” he added.
Prior to that, several MPs left the organisation, leading to the collapse of its political group in the parliament.
Uspaskich, the Labour Party’s founder and long-time leader, has not been actively involved in the party’s activities for the last two years.
In mid-June 2022, the MEP resigned from the chairmanship, saying that he wanted to “give the party a new impulse, new ideas, youthfulness”.
Last March, the politician suspended his party membership following reports of a law enforcement investigation into suspicions that an MEP might have employed fake assistants to misappropriate more than 500,000 euros from the European Parliament. The Labour Party’s headquarters were searched as part of the probe.
Uspaskich is the party’s only representative in the European Parliament. His term as MEP is ending in mid-July.
The politician had led the Labour Party intermittently since 2003. He was last re-elected as its chairman in November 2021.
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