Member of the European Parliament (2014–2019) Mamikins was elected to the
European Parliament at the
2014 European Parliament election for the
Harmony party. Although he was placed 4th on the Harmony list, Mamikins was preferenced first on the list by Latvian voters and took the party's single seat in the Parliament. He sits with the
Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group. In mid-2014 Mamikins filed his
declaration of financial interests in the European Parliament in Russian, which was promptly refused because Russian is not an
official language of the European Union. Mamikins publicized the incident on social media, making waves in
Latvian Russian community. Mamikins worked on the delegation for relations with
Belarus, as well as a substitute member on the delegation for relations with EU-
Kazakhstan, EU-
Kyrgyzstan and EU-
Uzbekistan Parliamentary Cooperation Committees, and for relations with
Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan and
Mongolia. He has since been a member of the
Committee on Foreign Affairs. In this capacity, he served as the parliament's rapporteur on the
Association Agreement between the EU and Georgia. In November 2016, the Baltic Centre for Investigative Journalism
Re:Baltica reported that Mamikins and another Latvian MEP
Iveta Grigule were circumventing the 2014 ban of hiring close relatives as assistants, with Mamikins employing Grigule's daughter Anete and Grigule employing Mamikins' wife Natalija. All four of them declined to comment. In December 2016, Mamikins met with
President of Syria Bashar al-Assad and parliamentary speaker Hadiey Abbas and visited the
Khmeimim Air Base along with five other MEPs and representatives of Russian Federation's Federal Council of the Federal Assembly. The visit was condemned by
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia Edgars Rinkēvičs and Security Police head Normunds Mežviets. In December 2017, according to the ranking website MEPRanking.eu, Mamikins was ranked as the 4th most effective Latvian MEP (out of 8) and 365th most effective member of the European Parliament (out of 751). In 2018, he left the Harmony party after disagreements with
Nils Ušakovs over hiring Ušakovs' ex-wife Jeļena Ušakova as an employee in Mamikins' office in Brussels. Mamikins was selected as
Latvian Russian Union's No. 1 pick for the
Riga constituency and nominated as a candidate for
Prime Minister in the
2018 national election without joining the party. Mamikins said to have been motivated to run in the election by the
upcoming education reform and did not rule out a partnership with his former party. In 2020, Mamikins, alongside his party members
Tatjana Ždanoka and
Miroslavs Mitrofanovs, was included in the European Platform for Democratic Elections database of "biased observers" for backing disputed and rigged elections in
Russia and
Russian-occupied Ukraine. ==References==