Social Democratic Party of Lithuania
The Social Democratic Party of Lithuania is a centre-left and social democratic political party in Lithuania. Founded as an underground Marxist organisation in 1896, it is the oldest extant party in Lithuania. During the Soviet occupation, the party ceased to exist. The party reemerged after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communist rule in 1989.
The party led a government in the unicameral Seimas, Lithuania's parliament from 2001 to 2008 and from 2012 to 2016. It has been the ruling party of Lithuania since 2024. The party is a member of the Party of European Socialists, Progressive Alliance, and Socialist International.
History
Establishment
Initial discussions about forming a Marxist political party in Lithuania began early in 1895, with a number of informal gatherings bringing together social democrats of various stripes resulting in a preparatory conference in the summer of that year. Differences in objectives became clear between ethnic Jews and ethnic Lithuanians and Poles, with the former seeing themselves essentially as Russian Marxists while the latter two groups harboured both revolutionary and national aspirations. Moreover, the ethnic Poles and Lithuanians saw themselves divided over the question of alliance with non-Marxist liberals. As a result, not one but three Marxist political organisations would emerge in Lithuania between 1895 and 1897.The Social Democratic Party of Lithuania was founded on 1 May 1896 at a secret congress held in an apartment in Vilnius. Among the 13 delegates were Andrius Domaševičius and Alfonsas Moravskis—a pair of intellectuals regarded as the central organisers of the new political entity—and the future President of Lithuania, Kazys Grinius, as well as a number of worker activists. Also in attendance as a representative of the radical youth movement was an 18-year-old ethnic Pole named Felix Dzerzhinsky, later the head of the Soviet secret police. As Lithuania was then part of the Russian Empire, the LSDP was inevitably an illegal organisation, meeting in secret and seeking to bring about the revolutionary overthrow of the Tsarist regime.
The LSDP was a dual language organisation, publishing its illegal newspapers both in Lithuanian and Polish. Newspapers were published abroad, printed in East Prussia and smuggled across the border. Technical assistance was occasionally provided by the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania party, headed by Julian Marchlewski.
The party's first program, approved in 1896, was directly influenced by the Erfurt Program, as well as the resolutions of the Second International and the program of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish Socialist Party. It called for an independent democratic republic of Lithuania in a federation with Poland, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine. It was the first political organization in Lithuania to call for Lithuania's independence from the Russian Empire.
This smuggling of Lithuanian newspapers had historical antecedents. Following the Polish and Lithuanian Uprising of 1863, the Tsarist regime had banned publication of all newspapers which used the Latin alphabet, a measure which amounted to a de facto ban of the entire Lithuanian press. This proscription extended for the rest of the 19th Century; in 1898 of 18 newspapers appearing in Lithuanian, 11 were published by Lithuanians in emigration in America and the other 7 were published in East Prussia.
The LSDP was very nearly obliterated at birth by the Okhrana, which over the course of 1897 to 1899 managed to arrest a number of the party's leading activists. Approximately 280 socialist and trade union organisers were apprehended during this period, with subsequent trials leading to the Siberian exile of more than 40 people, including Domaševičius and Dzerzhinsky. Other top leaders, including Moravskis, were forced to flee the country to avoid being swept up in the Okhrana's dragnet. With the party leadership jailed or chased from the country, the LSDP very nearly ceased to exist as the 19th century drew to a close.
Resurgence
From 1900 to 1902, the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania began to tentatively rise from the ashes behind a new crop of young revolutionaries. Chief among these were a pair of Lithuanian students in Vilnius, Vladas Sirutavičius and Steponas Kairys.It was the first Lithuanian political party and one of the major parties who initiated the assembly called Great Seimas of Vilnius in 1905. In the Great Seimas, it represented the most radical left wing of the assembly and had poor relations with the assembly's other representatives, which belonged to the liberal Lithuanian Democratic Party and the Lithuanian Christian democratic current. These two parties opposed LSDP's program of armed struggle against the Russian government and it was thus not adopted by the assembly.
Split and reformation
During the German occupation of Lithuania from 1915 to 1918, the party abandoned previous projects for a multinational federation or autonomy within Russia, began to call for an independent democratic Lithuania and joined the Council of Lithuania. However, it experienced an internal crisis in late 1918 and was divided between supporting the Constituent Assembly of Lithuania or soviet rule. In December 1918, the majority of LSDP members in Vilnius, led by Andrius Domaševičius, left the party and established the short-lived LSDP-LKP which recognized the Bolshevik-supported revolutionary government led by Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas. A minority group of social democrats led by Steponas Kairys and Juozas Paknys remained in Lithuania, supported the government of Mykolas Sleževičius during the Lithuanian Wars of Independence and reestablished the party ahead of the 1920 Lithuanian parliamentary election.The party was one of the major political powers during the Lithuanian independence period between 1918 and 1940. Following the election of 1926, the party formed a left-wing coalition government with Lithuanian Peasant Popular Union. This government was dismissed after the 1926 Lithuanian coup d'état. The authoritarian regime of Antanas Smetona banned all political parties in 1936.
Period of Soviet occupation
During the Soviet occupation era, no democratically constituted political parties existed within Lithuania. Therefore, between 1945 and the 1989 restoration of independence, the party was assembled and worked covertly in exile.1989–2001
In 1989, the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania was restored. Kazimieras Antanavičius was elected to be party's leader. The party had 9 seats in the Supreme Council – Reconstituent Seimas and was not successful in substantially increasing the number in the following elections, with 8 seats won in 1992 and 12 in 1996.In 1999, the party's congress elected a new leader, Vytenis Andriukaitis and merger negotiations with the Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania –the bulk of the former Communist Party of Lithuania began. Members of the party opposing the merger left to establish "Social democracy 2000". The SDPL-LDDP coalition won 51 of the 141 seats in the elections in 2000. However, despite success in the elections, the coalition parties had to settle for a place in the opposition until 2001, when the collapse of the ruling coalition between Liberals and New Union allowed ex-President Algirdas Brazauskas to form a government with New Union.
Since 2001
In 2001, the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania and the Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania merged. The merged party kept the Social Democratic name, but was dominated by former Democratic Labour Party members. After the merger, Algirdas Brazauskas was elected leader of the Social Democratic Party.By the beginning of 2004, negotiations between the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania and various other parties to form electoral coalition. They managed to form electoral coalition called "Working for Lithuania" with their coalition partners, New Union. At the 2004 legislative elections, the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania won 20 of the 141 seats in the Seimas, but managed to stay at the helm of successive coalition governments, including the minority government between 2006 and 2008. During the minority government, party's parliamentary group became the largest one in parliament, mainly due to defections from the Labour Party and the New Union.
Brazauskas resigned as the chairman of the party on 19 May 2007 and was replaced by Gediminas Kirkilas.
At the 2008 elections, the party won 11.73% of the national vote and 25 seats in the Seimas, five more than in the previous elections. However, its coalition partners, the Labour Party, the New Union and the Lithuanian Peasants Popular Union, fared poorly and the party ended up in opposition to the Homeland Union-led government.
On 7 March 2009, the party's congress elected a new leader, Algirdas Butkevičius. He was the party's candidate at the 2009 Lithuanian presidential election, coming in second place with 11.83% of the vote.
At the 2012 parliamentary elections, the party took 38 seats and became the largest party in Parliament. Butkevičius became the prime minister, forming a coalition government with the Labour Party, Order and Justice and Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Christian Families Alliance. At the 2016 parliamentary elections, the party took 21 seats and formed a coalition with Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union.
In 2017, the Social Democratic Party withdraw from coalition. In 2018, some party members left and formed the Social Democratic Labour Party of Lithuania. After this split, the party lost a lot of support, but in 2019 it partly recovered.
At the 2020 parliamentary elections, the party achieved worse results than expected. Due to this, Gintautas Paluckas received criticism from party's board and resigned in 2021. After a leadership election, Vilija Blinkevičiūtė was elected as the new leader. After election of Blinkevičiūtė, the party's support nearly doubled thanks to her personal popularity.
In the 2024 parliamentary elections, the party achieved a "historic victory", finishing in first place with 19.32% of the popular vote and 52 out of 141 seats. While party chair Vilija Blinkevičiūtė had expressed her willingness to serve as prime minister during the campaign, she declined the role after the election, leading instead to the nomination of deputy chair Gintautas Paluckas. This unexpected change in leadership was criticized by the LSDP's potential coalition partners.
After the election, further controversy arose when the Social Democrats invited the newly created populist party Dawn of Nemunas to join the ruling coalition, along with the Union of Democrats "For Lithuania". The founder of Dawn of Nemunas, Remigijus Žemaitaitis, is known for making antisemitic statements, and his party's inclusion sparked backlash from Lithuanian civil society groups, as well as from lawmakers and ambassadors abroad, including US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Ben Cardin, German MPs Roderich Kiesewetter and Michael Roth, Polish senator Michał Kamiński, and the Israeli embassy. Roth, the chair of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, urged the LSDP to reconsider their choice and claimed that it would threaten LSDP's membership in the Party of European Socialists. However, no official PES condemnation of the coalition was issued, and the European party congratulated the Social Democrats with the formation of the Paluckas Cabinet on December 12.
In power, the Paluckas Cabinet raised Lithuania's defense funding to its highest level in the country's history, reformed the retirement fund system, re-established the option for low-income families to choose a public electricity supplier, increased child benefits and funding for education, abolished premiums for private healthcare services which are financed by the state healthcare fund, and established a road fund. On 27 June 2025, a taxation reform put forward by the Social Democrats was approved by the Seimas, which established a progressive taxation system for personal income with three tax brackets, raised corporate tax and established new taxes on sugar and non-life insurance.
On 31 July 2025, following a series of investigative reports on his allegedly corrupt business dealings, Gintautas Paluckas announced his resignation as prime minister and chair of the Social Democratic Party. Due to Paluckas's resignation, the LSDP first deputy chair Mindaugas Sinkevičius became the acting chair of the party. On 4 August, Rimantas Šadžius was appointed as the acting prime minister of Lithuania.