Latvian constitutional referendum, 2012

A constitutional referendum on the "Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Latvia" was held on 18 February 2012. Proposed amendments included Articles 4, 18, 21, 101 and 104 of the Constitution of Latvia by adding the condition about Russian as the second official language, as well as prescribing two working languages — Latvian and Russian — for self-government institutions. The referendum's question was "Do you support the adoption of the Draft Law "Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Latvia" that provides for the Russian language the status of the second official language?".

According to the 2000 census, Russian was the native language of 37.5% and the second language of 43.7% of the residents. Since 2000, Russian has been regarded as a foreign language according to the Official Language Law.

In 2010, the National Alliance started to collect signatures to force a referendum on whether all publicly financed schools would have to use Latvian exclusively. By 9 June 2011, they had gathered 120,433 signatures of the minimum 153,232 signatures required, failing to force a referendum.

Protesting against the National Alliance initiative, on 15 February 2011, the youth movement "United Latvia" (Russian: Единая Латвия), led by Eduars Svatkovs, announced the idea of making Russian an official language, alongside Latvian. On 4 March 2011, "United Latvia", together with the newly created organisation "Mother Tongue" (Russian: Родной Язык), led by activist Vladimir Linderman (former leader of the Latvian branch of the Russian National Bolshevik Party), Yevgeny Osipov (leader of "Osipov Party"), and Aleksandrs Gaponenko (director of the Institute of European Studies, economist), started to collect signatures for a referendum petition. They gathered 187,378 signatures, forcing a referendum.

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