Tomas Vytautas Raskevičius, a 35-year-old openly gay politician, was elected chairman of Lithuania’s liberal Freedom Party.
He will lead the hard-pressed party, which failed to win any parliament seats in October’s general elections, for two years.
At the party’s convention in Vilnius on Saturday, delegates were choosing from three candidates, including Gražvyda Petrikaitė and Vasilijus Savinas. Raskevičius won the election with 91 delegate votes, while 15 voted for Petrikaitė and 11 for Savinas.
Raskevičius was a parliament member between 2020–2024 and chaired the Committee on Human Rights.
The Freedom Party, founded in 2019, campaigned in the 2020 elections with promises to legislate same-sex civil partnership and decriminalise soft drugs. Failing on both counts, it failed this year to cross the 5-percent electoral threshold to win parliament seats, although Raskevičius and the party’s former leader Aušrinė Armonaitė both advanced to the run-offs in their respective single-member constituencies.
Armonaitė resigned as the party’s chairwoman in response to the poor performance.
Raskevičius studied political science in Vilnius and human rights law in Central European University in Budapest. Before turning to politics, he worked for the LGBTQ rights NGO LGL and helped organise Baltic Pride marches in Vilnius. He was also the head of the Equal Opportunities Integration Unit at the Office of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson.
The Freedom Party had 11 seats in the previous Seimas and was part of the ruling coalition with the conservative Homeland Union and the Liberal Movement.
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