Raimond Kaljulaid: Parties ruling out cooperation with one another utterly ridiculous
Ahead of the October local elections, parties have once again played the card of ruling out cooperation with one another, but as Raimond Kaljulaid writes, that card has lost much of its value in recent years.
When Reform Party chair and Prime Minister Andrus Ansip ruled out cooperation with the Center Party under Edgar Savisaar in 2010, it was big news. These were the two largest parties at the time, led by two of Estonia's best-known and most popular politicians.
In the elections that followed shortly after, the Reform Party took first place and the Center Party came second. The Center Party remained in opposition for a long time and the Reform Party indeed never worked with the Savisaar-led Center Party in Toompea.
Ahead of this year's local elections, parties are once again playing the "ruling out cooperation" card, but it must be said that this card has lost much of its value over the past fifteen years.
The Reform Party has ruled out working with both the Center Party and EKRE. The Center Party, for its part, has ruled out working with the Reform Party. Smaller parties have also issued their own exclusions and the party currently enjoying the strongest public support — Isamaa — is under pressure to declare its own exclusions.
There are several reasons why this festival of exclusions feels downright ridiculous this time around.
Most people probably don't take any of this too seriously, as parties have shown remarkable flexibility in interpreting their promises when it comes to the question of whether to be in power or in opposition.
The most striking example, of course, came after the 2019 parliamentary elections. Before the vote, the Center Party promised not to cooperate with EKRE, while EKRE ruled out working with the Center Party as long as it maintained a cooperation agreement with United Russia, the ruling party of the Russian Federation, and laid out several other conditions for cooperation. All of these promises and red lines were promptly forgotten after the election.
At the same time, the Center Party's agreement with United Russia did not prevent the Reform Party from entering into a coalition with them in 2021. That agreement with United Russia wasn't formally terminated by Estonia until the spring of 2022.
It's obvious that when everyone rules out everyone else, nothing is truly ruled out. Perhaps only EKRE is so off-putting to some parties' voters that such promises might actually stick, but I certainly don't believe we won't see the Reform Party and the Center Party in the same government on Toompea Hill, or Tallinn for that matter.
So what does a liberal voter gain from ruling out cooperation with the Center Party? It certainly increases the likelihood that the next city government in Tallinn will be formed by the Center Party and EKRE. Congratulations — well ruled out!
It's especially absurd how inconsistent parties are with their exclusion policies. Take note of how cooperation with EKRE is ruled out in Tallinn, but not in other local governments across Estonia.
If EKRE is, in the eyes of Estonian liberals, a Kremlin-aligned Nazi party that parrots Moscow's talking points, then what difference does it make whether they're partnered with in Tallinn or Kuressaare? That sounds like someone trying to argue that, unlike the Nazis in Berlin, the Nazis in Bremen or Hesse were somehow more humane or acceptable. If EKRE's values are fundamentally unacceptable to mainstream parties, then those values don't magically stop at the Harju County line. Or is there another version of EKRE operating in Ruhnu or the municipalities along Lake Peipus that has nothing to do with the Helme-led party on Toompea?
When it comes to Germany's firewall around the AfD, the discussion always concerns all of Germany. Mainstream parties react very strongly whenever there's talk of cooperating with the AfD, no matter where or at what level.
I'm not saying that parties should become even more principled in their exclusions. Ruling out cooperation with a particular party only makes sense if it comes with majority support from other parties. Only then does it carry real societal weight. We don't have that in Estonia, which largely renders all this talk of exclusion meaningless.
Likewise, parties that claim to rule out cooperation have no problem accepting members from those very same parties whose values they publicly denounce as unacceptable.
So cooperation with EKRE and the Center Party is off the table, but cooperation with EKRE and Center Party politicians is another matter? How does that make any sense? Weren't these people just recently representing exactly those values that are supposedly unacceptable?
I can still understand if we're talking about a rank-and-file party member who may have ended up there by accident. But if we're talking about a party's most recognizable figures — board members, MPs — then, excuse me, these are the very people who shaped and represented those "unacceptable" values.
Will Kristen Michal's Reform Party now send the former Center and EKRE politicians who joined them in the Riigikogu back to the political sidelines, since cooperation with their values is supposedly out of the question? Most likely not — they'll want to preserve the government's already slim majority.
In short, this entire exclusion campaign is so insincere and unserious that it's just yawn-inducing — and clearly, voters don't care about it either. More importantly, we should remember that Estonia is currently facing the gravest external threat in the past 30 years. Perhaps this is a time to look for common ground between people and parties of differing worldviews and try to stitch a deeply polarized society back together.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski
