Coping with an Anti-Establishment Surge Across the Political Spectrum: the Case of Estonia

Among the former Soviet Republics, Estonia together with the other two Baltic countries is an example of successful democratic consolidation. Yet, the last decade in Estonian politics has been shaped by an anti-political-establishment surge on both sides of the political specturm, which brought a conservative-populist party into government and is set to launch a liberal-technocratic newcomer, Estonia 200, into parliament as one of the most popular parties. This anti-establishment challenge has not undermined democratic political competition but has in a sense rather strengthened it. The current paper traces how this upheaval has unfolded in Estonian political discourse through an analysis of the entire media and parliamentary discourse from 2007 to 2022. The parliamentary elections in 2011 resulted in a four-party parliament instead of the usual six and the right-liberal Reform Party, which had been a member of every coalition since 1999, established almost a quasi-hegemonic position – no government coalition was possible without its participation, and it was in a position to dictate the terms of all government policy. In parallel to this concentration of power, public discontent began to visibly accumulate. By the elections in 2015, two protest parties – a moderate conservate Estonian Free Party and a populist-conservative Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) had established themselves and entered parliament. The former failed to endure, while the latter managed to triple its support by the 2019 elections and was included in a government coalition, which lasted until the beginning of 2021. This surge of populism, in part, triggered a liberal-technocratic counter-reaction in the form of Estonia 200, an entirely new party that was established a year before the 2019 elections. Even though they failed to enter parliament in 2019, three years later Estonia 200 is competing with EKRE over the position of the most popular party. The current paper will give an account of how this transformation manifested itself in Estonian political discourse both in media and in parliament from 2007 to 2022. For this end, first, an almost complete media corpus for that period has been collected, which contains all content of the three major daily newspapers as well as the public broadcasting company (~3.5 million articles). Second, all parliamentary transcripts have been collected for the same period. Together, these two corpora cover almost the entire public political discourse in the country over almost four electoral cycles (except for social media). The analysis will trace the emergence of and counter-reactions to populism using supervised (classification of sentiment and populist speech) and unsupervised (topic modelling using word embedding and transformer-based models) machine learning techniques. As such, it will provide a unique overview of how the emergence and normalisation of populism has transformed the public political discourse in Estonia in terms of the range of issues that stand out and the level of emotionality of political discourse, while the democratic functioning of the political system as a whole and the basic democratic institutions that uphold democracy have, at least until now, held in place.