A shadowy “deep state” secretly runs the country. A smart immigration policy is “blacks go back.” Nazi Germany was not all bad.
None of these statements would be out of place in the darker corners of far-right blogs anywhere in the world, but in Estonia as of last month, they are among the views of government ministers.
Since emerging from the Soviet shadow three decades ago, Estonia has gained a reputation as a nation with a savvy focus on e-government, a vibrant free media and broadly progressive politics.
Illustration: mountain people
However, as in many European countries, Estonia’s far right in the past few years has been edging upward in the polls and nobody was all that surprised when the nationalist Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) won 19 out of 101 seats in parliamentary elections in March.
The real shock came a few weeks later, when Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas invited EKRE to join a coalition government.
Ratas offered EKRE five out of 15 ministerial positions and policy concessions, including agreeing to hold a referendum on whether to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.
The party’s father-and-son leaders, Mart and Martin Helme, took the key posts of interior and finance minister respectively, and celebrated by flashing a “white power” symbol at their swearing-in ceremony.
EKRE’s transition from the noisy fringe to the heart of government represents a remarkable failure of mainstream politics.
Between them, two broadly centrist parties won a comfortable majority of seats in the March vote, and Kaja Kallas, leader of the Estonian Reform Party that placed first, offered Ratas and his Estonian Centre Party a coalition in which she would be prime minister and the two parties would share ministerial posts equally.
Instead, ignoring the offer and stark warnings from his allies in Brussels not to negotiate with EKRE, Ratas arranged a conservative coalition, including the far-right party, which has allowed him to stay on as prime minister.
“He threw all his values down the drain just to remain [prime minister],” said Kallas, who had been on course to become Estonia’s first female prime minister, but instead remains in opposition.
Many liberals fear that the climate has already started to change.
Vilja Kiisler, a columnist at the newspaper Postimees with two decades of journalistic experience, said that her editor-in-chief called her into his office shortly after the coalition formed and told her that a piece she had written about EKRE was too aggressive and she should tone down her rhetoric.
“I’ve always criticized the people in power and this had never happened before,” she said.
Rather than self-censor, she decided to resign.
“Style and content are always connected and I meant every word, comma and full stop. If you can’t be sharp and clear in an opinion piece then what is the point?” she said.
Kiisler said that EKRE media portals attacked her work and she received threats of violence and rape through e-mail and Facebook, which she has reported to the police.
For a nation where the media landscape was this year ranked the 11th most free in the world, the resignations of Kiisler and a state radio journalist who left his job for similar reasons have come as a shock.
They even prompted Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid to wear a sweater emblazoned with the words “speech is free” to the swearing-in of the new government.
Kaljulaid said that she wore the sweater because of the climate of increasing verbal attacks on Estonian journalists.
“This can lead to self-censorship, in the sense that you don’t talk anymore to avoid this kind of shit storm, and I don’t want this to happen,” she told the Guardian in an interview at Tallinn’s presidential palace.
Kaljulaid nevertheless gave her approval to the new government, saying that she had no formal veto power.
“If I had thought that signing off on this list of ministers would be a greater danger than unleashing constitutional uncertainty, I could have considered it, but this is not the case,” she said.
However, she did walk out of the ceremony during the swearing-in of an EKRE politician, Marti Kuusik, as minister of information technology and foreign trade.
Kuusik, who faces a series of domestic violence allegations, resigned the next day. He has denied the allegations.
Mart Helme criticized Kaljulaid’s walkout as the action of “an emotionally heated woman.”
“They are setting an example that it’s OK to call names, to threaten violence. It has brought misogyny out of the closet and its a very bad sign for our society,” Kallas said.
EKRE has forged links with other far-right groups in Europe, joining the Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s coalition of nationalists and welcoming France’s National Rally party president Marine Le Pen to Tallinn for discussions.
Like populist parties across Europe, EKRE has highlighted immigration as a key battleground issue.
Mass migration hardly seems a major concern for Estonia, which has not been on any route to Europe taken by refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa, but EKRE has suggested that by allowing any migration at all, Estonia would be vulnerable to pressure from Brussels to resettle many more refugees.
Jaak Madison, an EKRE lawmaker who is also to become a member of the European Parliament if the party clears the threshold at upcoming European elections, said that the nation could take “10 or 50” refugees, but with the proviso that “when the war is over they go home.”
In an interview at his office inside the Riigikogu, Estonia’s parliament, Madison described the white power signals from Mart and Martin Helme as “pure trolling” that should not be taken seriously.
He said that there were “maybe a few people in the party who are really thinking this, white power and supremacy,” but added that people would only be kicked out of the party for extremist deeds, not extremist opinions.
Madison is considered the polished face of the party. When asked about a blog post he wrote several years ago praising Nazi economics, he did not disown the views.
“The fact is that the economic situation raised. That’s a fact. How did it happen? It was very wrong things. If you’re pushing people to camps, it’s wrong, but the fact is that the unemployment rate was low,” he said.
Madison is not the only EKRE lawmaker to be curious about Nazi economics.
Ruuben Kaalep, the leader of EKRE’s youth wing, Blue Awakening, said that right-wing politicians “can’t completely disown” Nazi Germany, which had certain positive elements.
Kaalep is Estonia’s youngest lawmaker, aged 25, and in an interview at a chic restaurant not far from parliament, he described his mission as fighting against “native replacement,” “the LGBT agenda” and “leftist global ideological hegemony.”
The party has largely avoided baiting Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority, instead using historical sensitivities over Soviet-era population transfers to exploit fears of a new — currently imaginary — wave of Muslim migration.
However, Kaalep said he did not believe that Estonia’s Russian-speakers could ever be considered Estonian, even if they learned fluent Estonian and identified as Estonian citizens.
The party has called for a quota system for passportization of the community.
Some fear this kind of rhetoric could pave the way for Russia to make more forceful attempts to “defend” ethnic Russians in the country and provide grist to the Kremlin’s propaganda mill.
“Russia has always tried to show Estonia as a small Nazi state, but it had no basis for it,” Kallas said. “Now they can use everything that the current government does against us.”
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