by Virgis Valentinavičius, LRT.lt

President Gitanas Nausėda has spent a year and a half ignoring the fact anti-Semitism is recognized at the parliamentary level in Lithuania, and as elections were approaching he rejected proposals to create a cordon sanitaire [buffer zone] against radicals, but he finally saw the light. Just a few months before elections the president reluctantly admitted there is no place in government for anti-Semites, but from that time as well he berated proponents of this cordon sanitaire idea because, supposedly, they were motivated by immoral electoral interests.

The official called the head of state in the constitution had a partial epiphany of the threat posed by anti-Semitism, but there it ended. The story began in May and June of 2023 when Remigijus Žemaitaitis began tossing around anti-Semitic statements in public. The prosecutor found Žemaitaitis had posted anti-Semitic texts on facebook on May 8 and June 13, 14 and 15, 2023. Žemaitaitis posted anti-Semitic texts on facebook, such as: “Besides Putin another group of beasts has appeared in the world: Israel;” Lithuanian Jews together with Russians exterminated the village and population of Pirčiupiai on June 3, 1944″ and “our government representatives don’t care at all about the murder of our Lithuanians by the Jews who lived in Lithuania from 1941 to 1944.”

This is the exact beginning of Žemaitaitis’s anti-Semitic campaign and the electoral campaign he conducted based on that, May 8, 2023. And the president pretended not to hear the anti-Semitic statements that day, and later anti-Semitic statements in early summer.

Politicians from the ruling coalition and the Jewish Community and their leader Faina Kukliansky reacted immediately to Žemaitaitis’s anti-Semitic campaign, but the prosecutor’s office only began an investigation in June. The ruling majority nonetheless only initiated an interpellation against Žemaitaitis slowly and with difficulty in September of 2023.

It took several more months until the parliament voted on in favor of censuring Žemaitaitis on November 21, 2023. He responded by firing off another salvo of anti-Semitic comments while the president continued to hide in the bushes and pretended to look the other way.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Note: Remigijus Žemaitaitis created a political party based on the backlash to his anti-Semitic statements and his party won third place, close on the heels of the ruling Conservative Party in a poor second place, in the first round of voting last week. The second and final round of voting for members of parliament takes place this Sunday. lzb.lt has covered Remigijus Žemaitaitis’s ejaculations on social media, the reaction by his party and colleagues and legal actions against him extensively since May of 2023. As reported on our Russian-language page, unpopular leader of the Conservative Party and currently Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis sought help from the president to sequester what he called the advent of radical right extremist parties in Lithuania as part of a general European trend. Nausėda has been lukewarm on the idea at best and there appears to be a rift between the President’s Office and the ruling Conservative Party in government. The Conservative Party and Žemaitaitis’s party Nemuno Aušra are currently competing in a close contest for second place in number of seats in parliament, to be decided by the voters Sunday.