[LINK] "Estonia Can Handle Putin's Soft Power"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Leonid Bershidsky looks at Estonia facing Russia.

The results of yesterday's parliamentary election in Estonia would not be of interest to anyone outside the tiny nation, were they not a test of Russian President Vladimir Putin's soft power in the post-Soviet Baltic states. The voting tallies suggest that influence is on the rise, though still not big enough to be a serious cause for concern. Still, the Estonian government will have to stay vigilant in its battle for the allegiance of the country's Russian speakers.

The only participant in Sunday's ballot that improved its performance compared with the previous election was the Center Party, which is supported by the overwhelming majority of Estonia's Russian population. The group won 24.8 percent of the vote, a slight increase from 23.3 percent in 2011. Yet the ruling Reform Party still beat it with 27.7 percent of the vote (down from 28.6 percent four years ago), and since it will form the ruling coalition, the Center Party -- shunned by most other Estonian political forces -- will not be part of it. This situation is echoed in Latvia, where Harmony, the party of Russian speakers, formed the biggest faction in parliament last October but was kept out of the governing coalition.

On the surface, the treatment of the sizable Russian minorities in both Baltic states might seem patently unfair. In Estonia, they make up more than a quarter of the total population of 1.24 million, yet only a dozen ethnic Russian politicians -- most of them from the Center Party -- earned a place in the 101-member parliament. But that's partly due to many Russian speakers' citizenship status. Some 90,000 of them carry so-called "grey passports" which do not grant them voting rights, and another 130,000 are Russian citizens (though some of these hold Estonian citizenship, too). Once that's all taken into account, ethnic Russians who are Estonian citizens are, in fact, adequately represented in the legislature.

[. . . I]n Estonian politics, winning the Russian vote and staying in the mainstream requires some deft balancing. The Estonian Russians -- or Soviets, as may be the case -- are, when push comes to shove, Europeans. They like being able to travel freely within the EU, a right even the holders of "grey passports" enjoy, and they value their relatively high living standard. In Estonia, the average wage, at 832 euros ($931) per month is about twice as high as in Russia. Unlike in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the local Russian speakers see no economic advantage to living under Moscow's rule.