Nausėda says new government need not follow Taiwan policy

President Gitanas Nausėda says a new government is not obliged to continue its predecessor’s policy toward Taiwan. He told LRT’s television programme Dienos tema that debate over the name of Taiwan’s representative office in Vilnius was being given too much importance.

Nausėda said a Foreign Ministry letter to Taiwan’s counterparts was intended to open discussion about raising the level of cooperation and identifying obstacles that have kept its potential from being realised. He said the discussion should have been public from the outset, adding that secrecy had fuelled suspicions that information was being withheld.

In 2021, then Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis exchanged letters with his counterpart in Taiwan, leading to the office’s current name. At the time, Nausėda said, there were expectations of investments worth hundreds of millions and exceptional cooperation in technology and the new economy. Those expectations were not fulfilled.

Nausėda noted that in some other countries Taiwan’s offices are called Taipei offices, or there is no representative office, yet their relations and economic cooperation with Taiwan are considerably more significant than Lithuania’s.

He described a possible name change as only one part of the wider picture, and not the most important. He said Lithuania’s relations with China had become “zero” after the decision, adding that when discussing how to balance trade and investment with China at European Union level, Lithuania could only point out that the lights were off in the windows of China’s representative office or embassy in Vilnius.