Campaigners aiming to make Russian the second official language of EU member state Latvia suffered a crushing defeat after a referendum held on Saturday which spotlighted ethnic divisions in the ex-Soviet republic.

Near-complete official results showed that 75 per cent of voters had rejected the plan to change the Constitution to give Russian equal status with Latvian. The campaign organised by members of Latvia’s ethnic-Russian minority mustered 25 per cent of the vote.

Underlining the passions, turnout topped 69 per cent, one of the highest levels since Latvia regained its independence in 1991 after five decades of rule by Moscow.

Radical Russian-language activist Vladimirs Lindermans, at the helm of the Native Tongue lobby group played down what had been a widely expected defeat.

“Our main purpose was to start a dialogue and that dialogue has now started,” he told Latvian state channel LTV1.

Ethnic Russians, mostly from a Soviet settler community, make up 27 per cent of Latvia’s two million people and have pushed to end what they see as discrimination by giving their language equal constitutional status with Latvian.

But the campaign raised hackles among many majority ethnic-Latvians for whom their language is a symbol of freedom.

After Latvia was seized by the Soviets during World War II, tens of thousands of ethnic Latvians were deported to Siberia and Russian speakers were sent in, while the Russian language also dominated Soviet public life.

While Moscow called the vote an internal affair, its past vocal backing for the Russian cause has often sparked Latvian accusations of Kremlin meddling.

An issue that angers Russian campaigners is that the settler community’s members did not get Latvian passports automatically after independence, but instead have had to pass Latvian tests.

Otherwise they risk remaining stateless, and 290,000 people fall into that bracket, albeit down from 500,000 a decade ago, while 270,000 hold Latvian citizenship.