Between party-systems and identity-politics: the populist and radical right in Estonia and Latvia

Abstract

The article explores party-based populist and radical right looking at the cases of Latvia's National Alliance (NA) and of the Estonian Conservative People's Party (EKRE). The research question is: How does the intersection between the specificities of party-systems and particularistic identity-politics either facilitate or complicate the political engagements of EKRE and NA? This piece demonstrates that whereas the Latvian party-system provides the opportunity structure for the inclusion of NA as a legitimate partner into the government coalition, Estonia's mainstream political parties keep on excluding EKRE from the halls of power. This occurrence is highly subject to the different ways that the two-party systems have been dealing with parties suspected of pro-Kremlin leanings (Estonia: Eesti Keskerakond/Centre Party; Latvia: Saskaņa/Harmony). Meanwhile, the socio-psychological campaigns of both EKRE and NA over immigration and the refugee crisis tend to interlink these two policy-areas with the collective memories of 'colonization' under the Soviets and the collective anxieties of becoming 'colonized' again by others. This socio-psychological strategy has enabled both parties to augment their public appeal.

Ethnopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe in a State of Flux

“…Populist and radical right-wing parties have augmented their public appeal, embedding staunch opposition to minority rights and immigration into the broader frame of their Eurosceptic agendas (e.g. the cases of Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia and Hungary) (Kasekamp, Madison, & Wierenga, 2018;Kluknavská & Smolik, 2016;Kovarek, Róna, Hunyadi, & Krekó, 2017;Braghiroli & Petsinis, 2019). Furthermore, EU-membership has lost much of its attraction among candidate states in the region (e.g.…”

European populism before the pandemic: ideology, Euroscepticism, electoral performance, and government participation of 63 parties in 30 countries

“…The first observation we can make is that populist parties are by no means a unified phenomenon and there is diversity the new coalition revealed some populist elements in its EP manifesto, there were no evident traces of populism in SI's own programmatic documents to justify inclusion in our list. We additionally classify the following parties as populist which are not included in The PopuList: National Alliance in Latvia (Braghiroli and Petsinis, 2019) and the Brexit Party in the United Kingdom (the single-issue populist project by former UK Independence Party leader, Nigel Farage). We finally treat the Hungarian Fidesz and its satellite party, the Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP), as one single entity (Pirro, 2015).…”

“…The Latvian party system has recently experienced moderate-to-significant swings in the fortunes of its populist parties. (Braghiroli and Petsinis, 2019). The party is a member of the ECR group in the EP and also a signatory of the Bauska Declaration, a strategic document for transnational cooperation with the Estonian Conservative People's Party and the Lithuanian Nationalists, in which they affirm their common nativist outlook.…”

“…This was despite the prominence of immigration as an issue in the elections. (Braghiroli and Petsinis, 2019). In the EP, the party is affiliated to the ID group and transnationally with two other far-right parties, the Latvian National Alliance (NA) and the electorally marginal Lithuanian Nationalist Union.…”

The (not so) surprising longevity of identity politics: contemporary challenges of the state-society compact in Central Eastern Europe

“…It is open to debate whether such government without consensus merely got worse over the past decade or did not evolve in the first place (Harris 2019;Braghiroli and Petsinis 2019). Some suggest that the parties' failure to gauge people's opinions (Mair 2006), institutional complacency and backsliding (Greskovits 2015), and technocratic abuse of power (Cianetti 2018;Buštíková and Guasti 2018) have marked politics in the Eastern Europe throughout the period of transition.…”