RIGA, Latvia — Nine days after Latvians voted in a parliamentary election that gave no party anything close to a majority, negotiators for the four blocs trying to form a government say they have settled nearly everything except the question that has defined the country’s politics for 30 years: which language its children should be taught in, and what happens to schools that resist.
A 2022 law phased out Russian as a language of instruction in public schools, and the final cohort of pupils switched to Latvian-only lessons in September. The transition was supposed to be complete. But an audit by the education inspectorate this summer found that 61 of the roughly 150 schools that formerly taught in Russian were still delivering part of their timetable in Russian, in most cases because they could not find qualified Latvian-speaking teachers.
The center-right bloc that finished first in the Oct. 3 vote wants the next government to impose fines on school boards and to withhold funding from municipalities, chiefly Riga and Daugavpils, that it says are tolerating noncompliance. A liberal party it needs to govern argues that the shortage of teachers is real and that punishing schools would simply close them. “You cannot fine a school into having a chemistry teacher who speaks Latvian,” said Ilze Krūmiņa, the liberal bloc’s lead negotiator. “You can only train one, and that takes three years.”
Her counterpart in the first-place bloc, Andris Liepiņš, said the law had given schools four years. “Every other school managed,” he said. “The ones that did not are, with a few exceptions, the ones that never intended to.”
Language has been the sharpest fault line in Latvian politics since independence in 1991. Roughly a quarter of the population is ethnically Russian, and the war in Ukraine has hardened attitudes among Latvian speakers while leaving many Russian speakers feeling, as one Daugavpils parent put it, “like guests in the house we were born in.” The parent, Jelena Petrova, 44, said her daughter’s eighth-grade class now had a Latvian-language history teacher who commuted 90 minutes from Jēkabpils twice a week. “She is a good teacher,” Ms. Petrova said. “She is also the only one.”
Political analysts said the dispute was as much about signaling as about schools. “The first-place bloc campaigned on finishing the job, and its voters will read any compromise as backsliding,” said Māris Ozoliņš, a political scientist at Riga Stradiņš University. “The liberals have Riga councilors who would have to implement the fines. Both sides are negotiating with their own voters as much as with each other.”
The president has set a deadline of Oct. 24 for a nominee to present a cabinet. Negotiators said a compromise under discussion would tie penalties to a new teacher-training fund and delay enforcement until 2028. Mr. Liepiņš called that idea “a conversation starter.” Ms. Krūmiņa called it “the only version of this that does not end with empty classrooms.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 17 of the European edition with the headline: In Latvia, Coalition Talks Snag on the Language Children Learn In.
