Latvia counts its residents every year despite no recent census

Latvia’s Central Statistical Bureau says the country had 1,845,000 permanent residents at the start of this year, 15,500 fewer than a year earlier. LSM’s Re:Check fact-checking team examined claims that the true figure is far lower because many people have left the country.

Physical population censuses have not been held since 2011, but the bureau counts people living in Latvia every year. The article says the annual count is no less accurate, though the bureau’s explanation is cut off in the source text provided.

Claims that Latvia’s population is much smaller than official figures suggest appear regularly in online comments. Re:Check notes that pro-Kremlin propagandists have also repeated them. This summer, Andrejs Mamikins, who has moved to Russia, claimed that fewer than one million people remained in Latvia, putting the figure at 900,000. He said others had moved to Western Europe, Belarus or Russia.

Dmitrijs Matajevs, who was convicted in Latvia of justifying war crimes and moved to Belarus, had made a similar claim in one of his videos, the article says.

The issue came up again last week, when Agnese Irbe, editor-in-chief of the Telos portal, cited the alleged gap between official population figures and the number of people actually in Latvia as a reason for low voter turnout. Speaking during a Latvian Television live broadcast on the first working day of the new Saeima, she said Latvia had not held a census of people physically present in the country for a long time, and that tens or even hundreds of thousands counted as residents might not actually be there.

Irbe later told Re:Check that her remarks reflected her everyday experience of interacting with people and were not intended to undermine the work of statisticians.