Participants

Discussion

This roundtable analyzes the political fortunes of radical right and populist radical right parties in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The focus is on the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE), Latvia’s National Alliance (NA) and Latvia First (LPV), and Lithuania’s Dawn of Nemunas. While the National Alliance has been part of several government coalitions and EKRE was in power briefly, LPV broke-through in the 2022 parliamentary election and Dawn of Nemunas in Lithuania’s 2024 national election. Though sharing much in common with similar parties elsewhere in Europe, the Baltic radical right and populist radical right parties have supported Ukraine in principle and condemned Russia. However, there are signs that this stance is less certain and changing. For example, Ukrainian refugees are being blamed for economic difficulties, the issue of migration in general is being identified as a major challenge, and the necessity of increased defense funding is being questioned, etc. Meanwhile, fringe figures and other not-so-successful radical right parties generally parrot Russian narratives. Some realignment has recently taken place, with the emergence of LPV in 2022 and Estonia’s EKRE experiencing an exodus of members in Spring 2024 who were dissatisfied with the leadership’s ambiguous statements on Ukraine and its authoritarian style. Meanwhile, in Lithuania, although the mainstream parties initially set up a "cordon sanitaire" against Dawn of Nemunas, the rhetoric began to soften after the results of the parliamentary elections