Krisjanis Karins
Prime Minister of Latvia
Education
- Graduating with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude -
- PhD in linguistics - University of Pennsylvania, Kariņš moved to Latvia
Overview
Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš is a Latvian-American politician who has served as the Prime Minister of Latvia since 2019. A linguist and businessman by profession, he previously served as Latvia's Minister of Economics and a Member of the European Parliament. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, United States, to parents who had left Latvia during the Soviet occupation, he was active in the American Latvian community throughout his youth.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude and PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, Kariņš moved to Latvia in 1997 and founded a frozen food business. He helped found the New Era Party in 2002, which in 2011 merged with others to form the Unity Party (renamed New Unity in 2018). After serving as a deputy in Latvia's parliament (the Saeima), as Minister of Economics, and also as a Member of the European Parliament throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Kariņš was selected by New Unity to be its prime ministerial candidate in the 2018 Latvian parliamentary election. Following the election, New Unity was the smallest party elected to the 13th Saeima.
Following months of contentious negotiations in which leaders of the larger parties were unable to form a coalition, Kariņš was nominated by President Raimonds Vējonis in January 2019 as a compromise candidate to form a government. He took office on 23 January 2019 at the head of a five-party coalition, and survived a 58–33 vote of no confidence on 11 April 2019. During his tenure, he has led the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the 2021 Belarus-European Union border crisis.
Early Life
Kariņš was born 13 December 1964 in Wilmington, Delaware, United States, to a Latvian American family. As child refugees, his parents, with their respective families, fled the Soviet re-occupation of Latvia in 1944, grew up, met and married in Sweden before migrating to the United States. His father, Uldis, was a civil engineer who founded a firm in Delaware which later acquired other companies in the Mid-Atlantic region.
According to Kariņš, he and his older sister were the only two ethnic Latvian children in their elementary school. His family was active in Delaware's Latvian community, regularly attending Latvian church and Sunday school, singing in Latvian choirs, and attending and later working at Latvian summer camps including Garezers in Michigan. Throughout his youth, Kariņš played guitar and drums with his Latvian friends in a band that traveled throughout the United States and played at events such as weddings. He also took part in demonstrations in Washington, D.C., against the Soviet occupation. Kariņš first visited Latvia in 1984 and he spent summers there until moving to the country full-time in 1997.
After graduating from high school, Kariņš studied at the Münster Latvian Gymnasium in 1983. One of his teachers was Egils Levits, who was elected President of Latvia in 2019 a few months after Kariņš would become prime minister. From 1984 to 1986, he studied at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, before switching to a linguistics program at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated summa cum laude in 1988. In 1990, he received a grant from the American government to take Russian language classes in Leningrad, and in 1994, he received another government scholarship to study pitch accents and to teach sociolinguistics courses as a guest lecturer at the University of Latvia. In 1996, Kariņš finished a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and specialized in the field of automatic speech recognition.
Career
- Latvia - Prime Minister
