Unholy Alliance Between Left and Populist Parties: Case of Lithuania

The paper will investigate the inner workings of the alliance of the left with populist parties and its broader implications for the identity of left parties and liberal democracies in East-Central Europe. While the phenomenon has been recently observed in various countries in the region (for e.g. in Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, or Slovakia), this paper will mostly analyse Lithuania’s case. There, after landslide victory in parliamentary elections in October 2024, the Lithuanian Social Democrats (LSDP) broke their pre-electoral pledge and agreed to cooperate with a newly founded protest populist party “Dawn of Nemunas”. Moreover, they renewed this ‘unholy alliance’ in August 2025, when a new government was formed. From a comparative perspective, the study is relevant at least for two points. First, the LSDP, convincingly winning the 2024 parliamentary elections, bucked the regional trend of centre-left parties in East-Central Europe and elsewhere that are constantly losing voter support amid the rise of populism. Second, since 2004, the LSDP have been open to cooperation with various anti-establishment and populist parties and, at the same time, have frowned upon alliances with other mainstream parties, such as Conservatives and Liberals. Therefore, their decision to ally with the “Dawn of Nemunas” has been yet another “dance with swords” for the LSDP.The paper will thus aim to answer several questions. Namely, why has the LSDP risked its reputation by choosing twice to cooperate with “Dawn of Nemunas” despite presence of various other options? What does this decision say about the LSDP and the character of the Lithuanian parliamentary politics in general? And finally, does this cooperation pose the danger of democratic backsliding in the country, and what general lessons for the region could be inferred in this regard?