What happens in Riga matters in Tallinn – and not just because it's where Estonians go to catch cheap flights out of the Baltics.
Last week's meeting of the Baltic Council of Ministers in Riga had been planned for a long time, but the timing certainly didn't hurt Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis. Approaching the end of a colorful general election campaign, the mild-mannered PM received surprisingly strong endorsement from his Lithuanian and Estonian counterparts Andrius Kubilius and Andrus Ansip.
Usually, politicians avoid comment on elections in neighboring countries, muttering something about not meddling in the internal affairs of another state. Ansip paid lip service to the convention, but his basic message was one of unequivocal backing for Dombrovskis in the October 2 poll, as he explained to ERR News after the meeting.
“If some political forces make statements that maybe it's not necessary to pay back credit to commercial banks or to the IMF, then it's not just an internal issue here in Latvia. It will create complications for the whole region. Sorry to say, but we in Estonia don't want to pay for those kind of statements in our country,” he said.
“We would like to promote this region as one single Baltic region, and investors are taking our countries as one region. When somebody makes irresponsible statements, those investors copy it in their minds to neighboring countries, too... It's so easy to destroy this mutual trust with these kinds of statements, so I wish all the best to all responsible political forces here in Latvia,” Ansip added.
“We have had very good cooperation here with Valdis Dombrovskis. I wish all the best to Valdis Dombrovskis. According to my understanding his government made a really good job. Maybe it's too much to call it a 'success' but anyway the success he made in Latvia was really important also for Estonia,” Ansip said.
But there are other reasons why Estonians should care what's happening south of the border as well as the confusion of clueless investors – and it's worth remembering that Estonia remains Latvia's largest source of foreign direct investment.
Ever since the 2008 collapse of Parex Bank and subsequent IMF bailout, Latvia has found a place in the Estonian psyche as a tragi-comic land where things are even worse than they are in Estonia – an attitude immortalized by Estonian pop group Traffic's hit “Läti Disko.”
Conversely, while the word "Igaunija" (Estonia) has been mentioned during political campaigning in Latvia more than ever before, the northern neighbor isn't exactly referred to as a land of piim and mesi. Rather, Latvians hold up Estonia as an example of normalcy: if the Estonians have managed to get the euro and managed to come out of recession quicker than us, it couldn't really have been all that difficult.
Estonia's route to euro adoption and its comparatively shallow recession (only from the Latvian perspective of an 18 percent GDP reduction could Estonia's 14 percent drop seem impressive) are regarded as what should have happened in any “normal” country: and the one thing all Latvian parties agree on is that Latvia is exceptional, not normal.
One view is that that the difference between the political and economic situations in normal Estonia and exceptional Latvia correlates exactly with the proportion of the population that is Russian. Around a third of Latvians describe themselves as being of Russian ethnicity as against a quarter in Estonia.
Most Russians can be relied upon to back the Saskanas Centrs (Harmony Centre) party, giving them a much more powerful voice than they possess in the Estonian political landscape. For the first time since the Baltic Way, a party which has signed a cooperation agreement with Vladimir Putin's United Russia harbors a realistic chance of becoming the largest party in parliament and even part of the government.
On the face of it, such an outcome would have grave consequences for Estonia. An administration keen on currying favor with Russia and gaining Russian investment would scupper Baltic unity on questions such as the Nord Stream pipeline, the joint construction of a nuclear power plant in Lithuania (why bother when Russia is building one nearby?) and might drag down credit ratings in the region if it opted for a currency devaluation.
However, an overtly pro-Kremlin stance seems unlikely given the necessity for any government to include several different parties. And there might be some positive longer-term consequences. The Economist's Central and Eastern European correspondent Edward Lucas has made the point that the Baltic states missed a trick in not encouraging the formation of a “Baltic Russian” identity as an alternative to the Kremlin's idea of what being Russian is all about.
Estonia's President Ilves has often said that the Baltic states are the best place in the world to be a Russian – the only trouble is that not many Baltic Russians agree. If the Harmony Centre does join government – conceivably even alongside Dombrovskis, maybe Latvia would be taking a step towards solving the question of the ethnic divide that Estonia has not taken.
With a share of power, Kremlin claims that the Russian minority is a victimized underclass would be revealed as hogwash and even more importantly, Latvia's Russians would be forced to put up or shut up once and for all. If they put up, the idea of a progressive Baltic Russian identity might not be dead after all.