Lithuania’s leftist and populist opposition parties opened talks on forming a new government yesterday after austerity-weary voters evicted the EU Baltic state’s Conservative-led coalition in Sunday’s general election.

In power since 2008, the defeated Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius drove through biting spending cuts amid one of the world’s deepest recessions, but the resulting economic recovery failed to woo voters.

Under Kubilius, Lithuania’s economy clocked 1.4 per cent growth in 2010, before hitting six per cent in 2011, after shrinking by 14.8 per cent in 2009, without resorting to a currency devaluation or a bailout.

But his painful austerity drive – much wider in scope than measures adopted in western members of the EU – as well as a jobless rate of 10 per cent turned the tide of public opinion in the ex-Soviet Baltic EU state of three million people against him.

Analysts say not enough voters felt the benefits of renewed growth. But they are confident any future leftist coalition will leave much of Kubilius’s fiscal groundwork in tact.

“Despite all their promises, there will be no fundamental change to the policies of Lithuania,” Kestutis Girnius, a political scientist at Vilnius University, said regarding the country’s drive for speedy entry into the eurozone.

Membership of the debt-ridden currency bloc requires an annual spending deficit under three per cent of GDP, a target at which Kubilius’s administration made a priority.

As an antidote to austerity, Kubilius’s left-wing rivals pledged to introduce a progressive income tax.

They also vowed to “reset” ties with Moscow, rocky since independence and worsening over alleged market abuses by Russian energy giant Gazprom, Lithuania’s sole natural gas supplier. (AFP)