ELECTIONS. Kubilius identifies the Conservatives’ main mistake

According to the politician, the party should not have voiced the potential for a coalition with the Lithuanian Peasant and Greens Union (LVŽS) as loudly and openly.

“I would identify one thing as a strategic, but not completely rational act from our side. Already from spring we started speaking of a potential coalition with the “Peasants.” This way we provided them with a fairly large resource of trust, which is why a part of the electorate chose to vote for the “Peasants”, perhaps based off our early vote of confidence, thinking it is not much of an issue,” said A. Kubilius.

“Moods aren’t too great, we thought it would look a little better,” the former PM judged the results.

The TS-LKD earned 31 mandates through both rounds, while the LVŽS took 56 mandates (54 plus 2 independents).

This means that the responsibility of forming a coalition goes to Ramūnas Karbauskis and Saulius Skvernelis’ party, the Conservatives can now only be the junior partner in the majority. However the Peasant Greens could try their hand at a coalition with the Social Democrats as well.

“We could not predict the sort of wave the “Peasants” got,” states A. Kubilius.

The politician repeated that he fails to understand the rationale behind the LVŽS’ dual leadership. He described S. Skvernelis as a more rational politician, while describing R. Karbauskis’ speech and conduct as irrational and emotional.

The Conservatives lost almost all of Kaunas’ single-mandate districts. Essentially only Gabrielius Landsbergis won a mandate in Kaunas. All other districts in the city held to be the homeland of the Conservatives went to the Peasant and Green Union’s candidates.

“We will analyse. I suspect we received as many votes as we used to, though I have not yet counted. We never did get the absolute majority of the vote there. But this time the result came out similar to that of when the people of Kaunas elected Vytautas Šustauskas as mayor. That is to say many voters mobilised not to vote for someone, but rather against specifically us,” said A. Kubilius.