Rinkēvičs said that he plans to meet with the leaders of the various parliamentary factions on Friday to also talk about the matter.
He revealed that he plans to submit a proposal in the coming months to lower the threshold for initiating a referendum – though he did not say by how much, nor give other details of his proposals.
To initiate a referendum at present, initiators of draft laws or amendments to the Constitution currently need to collect more than 150,000, voter signatures – one tenth of the total electorate. The relevant provisions in the Law “On Referendums, Law Proposals and the European Citizens’ Initiative” were incorporated after the so-called bilingual referendum, which took place in 2012. It was a referendum on whether Russian should be made an official language in Latvia. A clear ”No’ was the answer, as expected, and many people believed the whole process had been a waste of time and money, so the requirements to call a referendum were tightened up.
Since then, all public attempts to collect signatures to initiate a referendum have failed.
In 2022, President Egils Levits also spoke about the possibility of lowering the threshold for initiating a referendum. Previously, in order to submit an initiative for a referendum, it was necessary to collect 10,000 signatures from residents. From 1990 to 2012, eight referendums were held in Latvia.