Socialist Party of Latvia
political party

The Socialist Party of Latvia (Latvian: Latvijas Sociālistiskā partija, abbr. LSP; Russian: Социалистическая партия Латвии) is a Marxist-Leninist party in Latvia. It is positioned on the far-left on the political spectrum.
It was formed in 1994 as a successor party to the Communist Party of Latvia, which was banned in 1991. According to the "programme of the party", the LSP was founded as an organization upholding socialist ideas after the 1991 events that the party describes as a "counter-revolutionary bourgeois-nationalist coup".
Overview
The current CEOs of the party are Fridijs Bokišs, Ingars Burlaks and Vladimirs Frolovs. Between 1999 and 2015, the position was held by Alfrēds Rubiks, once mayor of Riga and later, leader of the unionist movement and head of the Latvian Communist Party (CPSU platform). He was imprisoned for six years in 1991, on charges of participating in a coup d'état against the Latvian authorities in August 1991. He is not one of the party's members in the Saeima (Latvian Parliament) since he is not allowed to contest elections. However, his sons Artūrs Rubiks and Raimonds Rubiks are members of the Saeima representing the Socialist Party, elected on a joint list with Harmony.
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This entry incorporates text from “Socialist Party of Latvia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.