For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK (Latvian: Tēvzemei un Brīvībai/LNNK, abbreviated to TB/LNNK) was a free-market, national conservative political party in Latvia.
It merged with the moderate Latvian National Independence Movement (LNNK) in 1997, and moved its emphasis to economic liberalisation.
Its only MEP, party leader Roberts Zīle, sat with the ECR group in the European Parliament.
Two of these parties, the '18th November Union' and 'Fatherland',[15] merged in 1993 to form the centre-right 'For Fatherland and Freedom' (Latvian: Tēvzemei un Brīvībai or TB).
[17] The new party took its name from the inscription on the Freedom Monument, and its focus was on undoing the effects of the Soviet occupation,[15][16] especially promoting the Latvian language and tightening citizenship laws.
A party with a similar background, the Latvian National Independence Movement (LNNK), won fifteen seats.
TB was the leading force behind two referendum proposals (in 1994 and 1998) to make Latvian citizenship laws stricter.
[17] The party fell just short of a majority, with leader Māris Grīnblats's right-wing coalition securing the support of 49 out of 100 deputies for the premiership.
[23] "For Fatherland and Freedom" campaigned as a strong supporter of Latvia's national interests and opponent of a federal Europe.
[15] The party opposed the naturalisation of the large population of Soviet-era migrants (Latvian: nepilsoņi) that live in Latvia.
[27] Of TB/LNNK's predecessors, For Fatherland and Freedom was more sceptical of the free market, while the LNNK supported full privatisation, within the context of a welfare state and protectionism.
[13] However, Riga's politics are shifting from an ethno-linguistic cleavage to a socio-economic one, leading to a softening of this disparity in the 2001 municipal election.
In 2009, British foreign secretary David Miliband criticized Conservative Chairman Eric Pickles' decision to secure an alliance with TB/LNNK in the ECR group "despite the fact that its members attend commemorations for the Waffen-SS".
[37] In a response, William Hague demanded an apology be made to TB/LNNK and the Latvian government from Miliband, describing his remarks as recycling "false Soviet propaganda" and noting that "the majority of parties forming Latvia’s current Government including the Prime Minister’s party, have attended the commemoration of Latvians who fought in the Second World War".
[38] The Israeli historian and Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Jerusalem, criticized the party's "obsession with paying public homage to the Latvian-SS Legion in contradiction to all historical logic and sensitivity to Nazi crimes" in a column for The Guardian on 28 September 2009,[39] while University of Vilnius professor Dovid Katz, writing that the British Conservatives must not be let "off the hook for their dalliances with some of the worst racists and Holocaust perverters in eastern Europe," called for Pickles' resignation as chairman in October 2009.