Referendum over Russisch als officiële taal in Letland leidt mogelijk tot nieuwe officiële taal EU (en)
BRUSSELS - A referendum on making Russian an official language in Latvia has raised the dim possibility of it also becoming an official language of the EU.
The country's Central Election Commission (CEC) in Latvia itself predicts the poll, on 18 February, will be a non-starter. A CEC spokeswoman, Kristine Berzina, told EUobserver on Tuesday (14 February) that "the level for the vote is so high it will never happen."
According to the rules, half of all voters in Latvia - 1.5 million people - must turn out in order to get a quorum and half of all 1.5 million must vote Yes to get a positive result. Around one third of Latvians are Russian speakers. But in some rural communities the figure is 60 percent.
If the bid comes through, it will put pressure on Riga to take a step at EU level.
The maximalist option would be to seek consensus among the other 26 EU countries to make Russian a fully-fledged official EU language, with EU funds used to translate all EU documents and provide interpretation at all meetings. The mini-choice would be to make it a "co-official" EU tongue, with Latvia paying the EU to use Russian on selected papers and events.
Dennis Abbot, a Europan Commission spokesman, noted that member states have never yet turned down a request by one of their peers to add a new official EU language.
Whatever happens in Latvia at the weekend, the vote has stirred debate inside the country and at EU level.
Tatjana Zdanoka, a Russophone Latvian MEP, told this website the EU should make Russian an official language anyway because it is the mother tongue of around 9 million EU citizens scattered across the Baltic countries and south-east Europe.
It is a point earlier made by Russia's former Nato ambassador, Dmitry Rogozin, who in November urged Russian speakers in the Union to petition the EU executive to take step. It is also a pet topic of Russian EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov, who likes to counter criticism of human rights abuses in Russia by saying that ethnic Russians inside the EU are being deprived of rights.
For her part, Zdanoka said the real aim of the campaign is to let Latvian Russophones use their language at municipal level to make life easier and to make them feel part of Latvian society.
She said the referendum comes in reaction to a bid by a far-right party in the ruling coalition, the National Alliance, to ban Russian from Latvian schools. In a sign of sharpening divisions inside the country, its Prime Minister, Valdis Dombrovskis i, has urged people to vote No. Its president, Andris Berzins, has urged them to "protect [the] Latvian language."
Zdanoka said the anti-Russian turn is a form of "revanchism" against the Soviet Unions's forced Russification of Latvia. She noted it might have had some sense in the wild days of the Soviet break-up in the 1990s, but is out of place in 2012.
For some Latvians, the whole thing is a storm in a teacup.
"It's purely political. In normal life there is no problem. Many Latvians speak Russian and Russian people know Latvian very well," the CEC's Berzina said.
A Latvian diplomat in Brussels noted that Riga has not consulted with other EU countries on the possible outcome. "At this point we are not discussing [options], as we are waiting for the results from 18 February," she said.