Main narratives:
- The government is destroying traditional values
- LGBTQ+ values are morally decadent
Overview:
After years of contentious debate, Latvia ratified the Istanbul Convention on November 30, 2023, with the treaty entering into force on May 1, 2024. The Convention, a Council of Europe human rights treaty designed to prevent violence against women and domestic violence, has since enabled significant reforms providing practical support to victims. However, opposition lawmakers and Greens and Farmers from the coalition have now submitted a proposal to withdraw Latvia from the treaty, triggering a disinformation campaign that systematically distorts the Convention’s purpose and effects.
The most prominent narrative being spread by politicians like Ainars Šlesers from the Latvia First party centers on the conspiracy theory that the Istanbul Convention promotes forced gender transitions for children. Šlesers shares alarmist videos claiming the Convention’s “ideology” will lead to “18-year-old girls cutting off their breasts” and children undergoing gender transitions. This represents a fundamental misrepresentation of the treaty, which is focused exclusively on preventing violence against women and domestic violence and contains no provisions whatsoever about gender transitions or medical procedures for minors.
Building on this fabricated threat, Šlesers and his allies frame the Convention as part of a broader ideological infiltration. He invokes Jordan Peterson’s rhetoric linking gender issues to Marxist thought, presenting the Convention as an “alien ideology” that threatens Latvia’s cultural foundations. By asking rhetorically whether the Convention “protects women or undermines the foundations of society,” Šlesers creates a false dichotomy that presupposes these goals are mutually exclusive, effectively reframing violence prevention as a threat to national identity and traditional values.
Liana Langa from the National Alliance employs a different but complementary approach, dismissing the Convention as performative bureaucracy. She argues that “various ineffective conventions are needed by the liberal world to imitate action,” claiming that conservative values and proper upbringing already prevent domestic violence. She also hints that while a person with conservative values would never harm a woman, liberals might “Liberalism turned the understanding of individual freedom upside down – I am free because I do what I want, I do not rule over my passions.” This narrative conveniently ignores the documented need for comprehensive frameworks to protect victims and hold perpetrators accountable, instead suggesting that conservative values alone suffice.
The disinformation campaign also includes personal attacks designed to undermine political opponents. Rudolfs Bremanis from New Latvians uses the derogatory, homophobic term “zilie” (blues) to mock the Greens and Farmers’ Union for previously supporting the Convention, attempting to discredit their policy position through slurs rather than substantive critique. Šlesers takes this further by posting images mocking the Unity party leader, suggesting he “looks like a transsexual” because he has a beard. This weaponization of transphobia serves dual purposes: it intimidates Convention supporters while reinforcing the false association between violence prevention measures and manufactured threats to gender norms.
What emerges from these coordinated narratives is a deliberate strategic pattern. Politicians opposing the Convention consistently distract from its actual violence prevention measures by manufacturing non-existent threats about gender and children. They exploit cultural anxieties about Western influence and traditional values while personalizing attacks to intimidate supporters. The campaign relies on emotional manipulation, conspiracy theories, and deliberate misrepresentation rather than factual critique of the Convention’s legal provisions or implementation. By creating a false choice between women’s safety and family values, these politicians obscure the Convention’s practical purpose: providing legal frameworks and support systems to protect victims of domestic violence and gender-based violence in Latvia.
These disinformation narratives closely mirror broader Russian information operations that seek to undermine Western governments by portraying Western civilization as degrading, eroding, and falling apart. By depicting liberal-democratic values as morally decadent and claiming they lead to the collapse of traditional values and social depravity, local Latvian politicians are either consciously amplifying or unwittingly enabling Russian propaganda objectives. Whether intentional or not, their use of conspiracies portraying the West and liberal values as existential threats creates fertile ground for Russian information operations to take root. At minimum, these domestic campaigns make it possible for Russian propaganda to tap into and amplify these sentiments, turning legitimate policy debates about international treaties into culture war battlegrounds that ultimately serve to destabilize Latvia’s European integration and democratic institutions.
