Elections 2023: Estonia avoids the abyss
Voters elect their new parliament…choosing, marginally, right over might….still, dangers lie ahead….and then there’s the view from Moscow.
Estonian voters chose to stay the course on Sunday, giving a strong, though not overwhelming, new four-year mandate to the nation’s pro-Ukraine prime minister, Kaja Kallas and her Reform party. Still, a host of domestic troubles headlined by soaring inflation, did not give Kallas an unimpeded path to an unswervingly pro-European direction.
The 45-year-old Kallas secured first place in the vote for a new parliament with a 31.5% majority over 16.1% for the far-right EKRE party, which campaigned for an end to arms shipments to Ukraine and a firm tilt toward the Kremlin. Nine parties fielded candidates for the 101-seat parliament, known as the Riigikogu. More than 900,000 of the nation’s 1.3 million population were eligible to vote and some 64% turned out. Six parties appeared to have passed the 5% bar to win seats.
“This result,” Kallas told her party colleagues and jubilant supporters at a hotel in the capital, Tallinn, “will give us a strong mandate to put together a good government. I think that with such a strong mandate, the (aid to Ukraine) will not change because other parties, except EKRE and maybe Center, have chosen the same line.”
Yet the Reform party’s win will still give Kallas only 37 seats, meaning she will need to cobble together a coalition that may in some fashion be like-minded, especially on the two major issues facing the government—inflation and Russia. Having utterly ruled out any ties with pro-Russian EKRE, she will likely turn to he Center Party and two outgoing coalition partners—the small conservative Fatherland party and the Social Democrats—as well as the newly-arrived Eesti 200 for support.
At the top of the priorities of Kallas and her new government are two issues—inflation and Russia. January’s inflation level of 18.6% was the fourth highest among the 27 nations of the European Union, nearly twice the EU average of 10% and more than triple the level in Spain. And it is persistently high—a tribute to the dislocations of the war in Ukraine, especially immigration of Ukrainians fleeing the war and Russians fleeing the draft, as well as the Russia sanctions that have impacted all of Europe deeply. Kallas has pledged reforms to address these issues, but they seem likely to be deeply embedded as long as the war persists.
The strong second-place showing for the pro-Russian EKRE party is a tribute to Estonia’s persistent ethnic Russian minority that comprises a quarter of the population—the flotsam and jetsam of the half century of enslavement by the Soviet Union. Ethnic Russians moved in en mass at the end of World War II when Estonia and its two Baltic neighbors, Latvia, and Lithuania, were overrun by Soviet troops and absorbed into the Soviet Union. At the time, tens of thousands of Russians left a Soviet Union that was utterly prostrate at the end of the war for what promised to a far more rewarding life in every respect in the prosperous Baltics, especially Estonia.
To this day this minority has continued to fight a losing, but at times virulent rear-guard battle to swing the nation into the Russian sphere and away from the overwhelmingly anti-Russian views of the vast majority of the Estonian people. In 2007, the decision to move a Soviet war memorial from the center of the capital, Tallinn, to the outskirts provoked days of riots by pro-Russian activists egged on by Moscow. The Kremlin in turn followed up with the most debilitating cyber attack ever staged by Russia against a NATO member that all but shut down banking, commerce, and vast swaths of the government.
One outcome was the stablishing of the NATO Cyber Defense Center, whose headquarters, ironically, happens to be in the same red brick building that once housed the Estonian Communist Party.
The efforts by Estonia’s Russians have repeatedly been aided and abetted by the Kremlin. In 2016, in the course of Donald Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency, I visited Estonia as part of a swing through all three Baltic nations. Here’s what I wrote about this visit in my latest book, A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen:
In Dominic, the small, dark but elegant restaurant with a world-class wine list on the fringe of Tallinn’s medieval Old Town, two well-dressed Estonian gentlemen sat across from each other, whispering in Russian. One a cancer surgeon, the other an importer-exporter, they explained they were whispering because the Russian language—and all it represents—is hardly well-received in this Baltic nation that shares a 183-mile border with Russia, was once a vassal of the Soviet Union, and still sees an existential threat from across the frontier that has become among the world’s most fraught, but least recognized, red lines. I first mentioned the two gentlemen in my CNN column that was headlined ‘Could world war III start here?’ And my answer then, three days before Donald Trump was elected president four thousand miles away, was indeed it could. And that impression has only intensified since.
In my three-week swing through the three Baltic republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—in the final weeks leading up to the 2016 elections, it was quite clear that the greatest fear, from the nations’ leaders to the most humble workers, was what might happen if Trump did win the election—placing Vladimir Putin in an even more empowered position to work his will on their nations. For the Russian minority, however—those ethnic Russians who arrived as occupiers in the previous century and learned the language from their parents and grandparents—an even more empowered Kremlin is still not unwelcome, though the sentiment is a close-guarded secret to be discussed fervently in their own households and only rarely admitted to strangers who might strike up a casual conversation. Still, when a visitor manages to win a bit of their confidence, they are not unwilling to concede that they admire the Russian leader.
“He is strong,” the cancer surgeon confides. “And he never tells us anything but the truth.” Clearly a true believer.
The next morning, I drove out to the Tallinn airport to meet Marju Lauristin, Estonia’s representative to the European Parliament, who was just returning from that body’s latest session in Strasbourg.
At a café in the airport terminal, until we were shooed outside by leather-booted Estonian troops responding to what turned out to be an ephemeral terrorism threat, Marju talked about her country’s history with Russia. “We have been a neighbor of Russia not for one hundred years but one thousand years,” Marju began. She understood profoundly just what those years meant to Estonia, as she put it, effectively enslaved so long by the nation that loomed over its history, culture, and the freedoms Estonians cherish but were rarely able to enjoy until the Soviet Union broke apart. Ironically, Marju comes from a family deeply enmeshed in Estonian Communism. Both her parents, Johannes and Olga, were leaders of the Communist Party of Estonia. It was the only real way to succeed in any tangible fashion in the Baltics of the Soviet era. Her fields were journalism and sociology, and she completed her doctorate in journalism at Moscow State University when Communism still held sway across the region.
Her dissertation, focusing on content analysis of Russian newspaper texts, gave her a full-blown taste of the hypocrisy of the Soviet state and how it spoon-fed propaganda to its people. So, nursing her horror of this system for two decades, in 1988 she leapt at the chance to break the bonds that enslaved her and her people. Together with Edgar Savisaar and several colleagues, she launched Rahvarinne (the Popular Front in Support of Perestroika)—a mass popular movement that had attracted some sixty thousand members within weeks of its debut. In a year, its mission had morphed from an effort to build more autonomy within a still-functioning Soviet red line to agitation for full-blown independence. In 1989, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that aligned the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, Marju was a leader of the Baltic Way, uniting the popular fronts of all three Baltic republics—each lusting for a total break from the Soviet empire and for full independence. On August 23, at 7 p.m. local time, nearly two million people joined hands for fifteen minutes to form what was then history’s longest human chain—their own red line of sorts—spanning 420 miles across all three Baltic nations starting at Pikk Hermann in Tallinn’s Old Town, winding through villages, up hills and down valleys, across three open frontiers, to its terminus at Gediminas’ Tower in Vilnius, Lithuania.
It was a stunning visual and emotional image for the Soviet Union, which promptly dismissed it as “nationalist hysteria.” But within seven months, Lithuania became the first of the Baltic republics t o declare its freedom. By the end of 1991, all three had declared their independence, and Western nations recognized their emancipated status. Effectively the red line that the Soviet Union had built around Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been replaced by a new one surrounding Russia, with the three new nations on the outside. Suddenly—with a single stroke—Russia had found itself on the other side of any number of red lines not of its own construction or mediation around the entire periphery of the Russian republic.
How those red lines came to be established—snaking 183 miles along the frontier with Estonia, been a thousand years of history in the boundary of her nation, and indeed all the Baltics, and Russia. In many respects, there is little in common between the three Baltic peoples. Estonians speak a language that is of the Finno-Ugric family, having more in common with the Finns to the north and west and Hungary….
Now Europe will be watching closely and cheering on the efforts by Kaja Kallas to maintain the direction that the vast bulk of her people are anxious for their country to pursue.
Thanks, David ... that election was indeed epiphanal. Also critical, the next election Andelman Unleashed will chronicle: Kazakhstan this coming weekend. Stay tuned ....
.... and spread the word !!
In Estonia, still $1.82 per liter ... 30 cents per liter higher than Poland and 12th highest in the 27-nation EU !! That is still $6.89 per gallon, incidentally ... or twice the average price in the U.S. !