Lithuania’s cultural community says it has seen no meaningful response from the country’s ruling parties following early October protests against plans to hand the Culture Ministry to the Nemunas Dawn party, and plans to continue demonstrations while expanding its movement beyond Vilnius.
“We’ve concluded that we really have nothing to celebrate and that the protest continues,” said Arūnas Gelūnas, director of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and one of the protest leaders, after the fourth Culture Assembly held Tuesday.
“We’ll be waiting for real results – not promises, not reassurances, not half-measures – but a clear choice of minister with a professional team whose members will not come from Nemunas Dawn,” he told reporters.
Nemunas Dawn has said it proposed a candidate for culture minister to Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė, but her spokesman denied this on Tuesday. Gelūnas said the conflicting claims show that any sense of progress is an illusion.
“This is a smokescreen,” he said. “We are still being treated like naïve people who have already had their celebration, listened to Čiurlionis, and will now calm down so they can be manipulated again. We’re watching the situation very closely, and ‘No to Nemunas Dawn at the Culture Ministry’ remains our slogan and our demand.”
Gintarė Masteikaitė, head of the Lithuanian Dance Information Centre and a member of the assembly’s initiative group, said the decision by Nemunas Dawn and the Social Democrats to jointly search for a culture minister marked “a return to square one”.
“They’re running over us like a bulldozer,” Masteikaitė said. “After hearing your statements and support today, we’ll have to strengthen our position. How we’ll do that, we’ll discuss soon and announce our next step.” She added that a second initiative group will likely form outside Vilnius to expand the movement.
Organisers described the fourth Culture Assembly as cross-sectoral, bringing together representatives not only from the cultural sector but also from environmental, business, farming, service, and media organisations.
Initiative group member Gintautė Žemaitytė said the effort will extend beyond the arts, with plans to propose a new civic action uniting protesters from different fields.
Gelūnas said the cultural movement opposing Nemunas Dawn “gained tremendous confidence” from Tuesday’s assembly.
Thousands of people across Lithuania protested on October 5 against giving the Culture Ministry to Nemunas Dawn. The strike culminated in performances of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis’ symphonic poem The Sea, which became the protest’s anthem and “warning siren”.
More than 250 organisations have expressed support for the protests, and 81,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Nemunas Dawn be excluded from leading the Culture Ministry.
For now, Education, Science and Sport Minister Raminta Popovienė, a Social Democrat, is serving as acting culture minister.
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