ABSTRACT
Public support for transferring national sovereignty to the European Union has never been large in Latvia, after it regained its independence from the Soviet Union only in 1991. EU support has never been above 50 percent in the last years, and in the country’s first European elections in 2004 the nationalist Fatherland Party won four of the nine Latvian seats. NATO membership on the contrary has been welcomed by far more enthusiastically. However, there is broad pragmatic agreement about the economic necessity for integration in the EU, which is why a clear majority of 67 percent voted in favor of the country’s EU membership in the accession referendum. A similar majority has expressed general support for the European constitution (European Forum 2004, Eurobarometer 2003c, 2004a). Nevertheless, the ratification of the constitution involved only the parliament (Saeima), which accepted it on 2 June 2005.1 Similar to the ratification of the accession treaty, a large parliamentary majority could be expected given that the constitutional debate created no major conflicts between the parties and Euro-skeptic voices are now only weakly represented in the Saeima.2
