In the Shadow of Global Polycrisis: Consensus and Polarization in the 2023 Estonian and Finnish Parliamentary Elections

The beginning of the 2020s has been marked by a near global polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2024). In addition to the global climate crisis brewing in the background, in 2020, the first global pandemic erupted, which pressured governments to take unprecedented measures and divided societies over social distancing measures and vaccination and disrupted global production and logistics chains and caused turbulence in demand and supply. In 2022, Russia launched full-scale war in Ukraine, which sent millions seeking refuge elsewhere in Europe, prompted unprecedented international economic sanctions on Russia and enhanced the military preparedness in most European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states. This also resulted in the rapid rise of energy prices and the danger of energy deficit, rise of inflation and interest rates. Hence, the general elections in Estonia in March 2023 and Finland in April 2023 took place in a situation of heightened international, economic and societal tensions and the outgoing governments having mainly dealt with crisis governance rather than focusing on fulfilling their electoral promises. In addition, both election campaigns also bore marks of bloc politics, where an otherwise multi-party system becomes aligned in two major camps and the campaign becomes a referendum on the proposed policies of these two camps. Whilst polarization – both affective and political – is very well documented in the United States, it is also making headways into European politics. Political campaign cultures and government–opposition relations are changing even in countries like Finland and Estonia, which have usually been characterized by notably low levels of polarization (Bettarelli et al., 2023; Nord et al., 2024). Previous research has suggested that after a crisis, voters are particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the (extreme) right. For instance, after a financial crisis, extreme right-wing parties increase their vote share by 30 percent (Funke et al., 2016). Moreover, as Lisinska (2022) has noted, in times of crisis, when taking substantial measures is of particular importance, continued polarization often leads to democracy fatigue. Whilst Estonia and Finland have not faced democracy fatigue, it seems clear that following the turbulent times of the last decade have led both countries to unforeseen levels of polarization and emergence of populist right wing. Especially Finland has a long tradition of multiparty collaboration, having a history of coalitions including from left to right, but the consensus-oriented society has lately reformed towards bloc politics with strong divisions between political camps. This shift towards bloc politics has resulted in more pronounced ideological divides and a rise in populist rhetoric. The political landscape in both Estonia and Finland now reflects a growing fragmentation, where the emergence of right-wing populism signals a significant departure from the historical consensus-driven political culture. Estonia and Finland are two neighbouring countries with traditionally different political standings and history. During the cold war, Estonia remained behind the Iron Curtain, whilst Finland was a neutral country. After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, it launched its (re)integration to the West, becoming a member of the EU in 2004 (which Finland had joined in 1995) and, in the same year, also joined NATO, whilst Finland remained neutral. Socio-economically, Finland is a Nordic welfare state, whereas Estonia has since its independence been a liberal welfare state. Despite their differences, Finland and Estonia share strong cultural roots (both speak a Finno-Ugric language, which differentiates them from both the Scandinavian and the Baltic countries) and have maintained a very amicable relationship. Both countries have a parliamentary political system, where the government is formed based on the results of the parliamentary election (although Finland used a semi-presidential system until the 1990s and, unlike Estonia, still elects its president directly). The Estonian parliament Riigikogu has 101 seats and the Finnish Eduskunta has 200 seats. Both countries use a proportional voting system, where the country is divided into electoral districts (12 districts in Estonia and 13 districts in Finland). In both Estonia and Finland, votes are cast directly for the candidate and indirectly for the party (or electoral list). Whilst Finland also allows electoral alliances to compete in the elections, which are an attractive solution for smaller parties, Estonia allows only parties and single candidates to compete. In Estonia, the electoral threshold is at 5%. In Finland, the mandates are distributed in each electoral district, using the d'Hondt method. In Estonia, the seats are distributed in three rounds: first, personal mandates are distributed to the candidates who pass the quota (all votes divided by number of mandates) in the electoral district. This is also the only chance for single candidates to enter the parliament. In the second round, district mandates are distributed between party lists, using the quota method whilst the party lists are reordered according to the share of votes each candidate earned. In the third round, compensation mandates are distributed, using closed national lists and the modified d'Hondt method. Both election systems slightly advantage the larger parties. In the following, we will give an overview of the electoral event in both countries, including the core campaign topics and the election results and the implications on both the domestic and international and EU level. We show that whilst the global polycrisis raises similar issues in Estonia and Finland, they play out rather differently, even within the common trend of emergent polarization and block politics. In addition, the article also demonstrates how the times of polycrisis entail taking important political decisions in between-elections periods rather than arguing them out during the election campaign. Finland's snap accession to the NATO after decades of the neutrality doctrine is a particular case in point. Both Estonia and Finland entered the electoral contestation under the leadership of a female prime minister. However, this is where the similarities end. In Finland, the coalition of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Alliance was led by Social Democrat Sanna Marin and had been in office since the previous election. Meanwhile, Estonia had witnessed three ideologically incoherent government coalitions in 2019–2023: whilst Kaja Kallas from the Reform Party entered the election as prime minister leading a coalition of right-wing liberal Reform Party, right-wing conservative Fatherland and left-wing liberal Social Democrats, she had also led a coalition government between the Reform Party and the left-wing conservative Centre Party in 2021–2022, which was preceded by a coalition of the Centre Party, Fatherland and populist radical right Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE), in office in 2019–2021. This meant that all the parliamentary parties of 2019–2023 had been in government, mostly in electorally inconvenient coalitions and the tensions soared high, especially between the liberal bloc led by the Reform Party and conservative bloc, where EKRE was most vocal. However, despite of higher coalition stability, Finland also entered the election amidst a notably high level of polarization between the parties. Topic-wise, defence and public spending issues were high on the campaign agenda in both countries. In 2022, Finland applied for NATO membership as a reaction to Russia's attack on Ukraine with full parliamentary support. Until February 2022, a clear majority of the Finnish public as well as politicians were opposed to NATO membership. The shift in opinion was sudden and seismic (Arter, 2024). Initially, Finnish politicians were reluctant towards a quick application to NATO membership, but surveys indicated a swift mood change amongst the population, with a majority of voters, regardless of which party they supported, siding with membership (Palonen, 2023). In contrast to Sweden (see, e.g., Palonen, 2023), not a single Finnish party opposed NATO membership. NATO membership was previously thought to become one of the key points to debate in 2023 elections, but the cross-party, pro-NATO consensus meant that security policy was not a campaign issue at the 2023 general election (Arter, 2024). According to Arter (2024), the campaign in Finland was largely uneventful. Perhaps, this was due to a degree of electoral fatigue, since 2021 had seen municipal elections, and in 2022 there were elections to a new tier of regional government. Despite national security being a major media topic, politicians saw little popularity gain in opposing Finland's consensus on NATO membership. The decision, supported by most Finns, was made in spring 2022. During the election campaign, Finland awaited acceptance into NATO, which occurred shortly after Election Day (Weckman, 2023). However, one topic, namely, economy, managed to stir some passion. The opposition, fronted by National Coalition, presented public spending and debt as the key campaign issues. The conservative-right opposition presented the government as irresponsible towards the next generations, especially with public spending increasing significantly during the pandemic (Palonen, 2023). The key notion was that unlike the other Nordic states, Finland's economy was too small relative to the size of the welfare state. Whilst the parties both left and right agreed to the problem formulation, the suggested solutions divided the parties. All parties except the Finns Party considered that one of the answers would be substantial increase in work-based immigration, whereas the Finns Party wanted to avoid any kind of immigration and suggested the current workforce to be employed more efficiently (Arter, 2024). The main economic battle line involved how to balance the books and kick-start the economy. Finland's National Coalition suggested income tax cuts to increase purchasing power as well as 9 billion euros in spending cuts to steady the ship. Social Democrats and the political left presented another way: to secure the economic growth with investments and selective tax incentives. Comprehensive income tax reductions were opposed because they benefited the better-off disproportionately. In this sense, the campaigning was a textbook example of political campaigning on a left–right spectrum. The heightened division between the (socio-)liberal-left and the (socio-)conservative-right marked also an increase of referendum-type campaigning, which brought very strong passion (and somewhat unheard in the traditionally 'grey' politics of Finland) to the debates: Sanna Marin warned voters from supporting the 'blue and black' alliance, referring to the National Coalition and True Finns, yet it was simultaneously widely understood as a reference to the neo-fascist movement.1 Similarly, the Finns Party chair claimed that 'culture – the arts is a luxury item on which Finland spends too much money'. The topics composition in Estonia was somewhat similar: the key foci of the campaign were related to fiscal policy, defence policy and economic security. As all parliamentary parties had been in government in the past 4 years, the campaign involved accusations and questioning of the electoral performance of virtually all parties. This was most prevalent surrounding fiscal policy, where the Reform Party (but also the Social Democrats and two new parties) campaigned for a balanced budget and not increasing state debt, whilst the conservative parties, especially EKRE, promised to kickstart the economy with government investments (and their electoral manifesto also included generous benefit schemes and tax cuts). The fact that all five parliamentary parties had served in government also gave a chance to two new parties, Estonia 200 and The Rightwingers, both liberal right-wing parties, which campaigned to a significant extent on the criticism of the other parties' record in government and promised a more rational and thinner state. However, the main axis of confrontation ran between the Reform Party and EKRE, which also utilised negative campaigning against one another, which may have benefited both parties. This was a major change, since in all the previous elections since 2007, the main standoff had been between the Reform Party and the Centre Party. The Reform Party used its credibility in international affairs and defence policy as its key campaign premise. Its campaign slogan was 'Estonia in safe hands' (Kindlates kätes Eesti) and they promised to raise Estonia's defence budget to 3% of GDP. The campaign focused strongly on the person of prime minister (PM) Kaja Kallas who was simultaneously taking a firm stand in the international arena as a supporter of Ukraine against Russia, earning her the nickname of 'warrior princess'. Although the parties' defence programmes did not differ notably, the Reform Party performed issue ownership credibly, and this topic was also widely regarded as most important by the electorate. The only party that aimed to challenge the Reform Party on the issue was EKRE, which occasionally aired controversial 'for peace' messages and attempted to frame the Estonian armed forces as incompetent (Jakobson and Kasekamp, 2023). However, in comparison with other far-right parties in Europe, EKRE still stands out for its lack of sympathy with Russia and its Euro-Atlanticist views on the offensive (Fagerholm, 2024). EKRE defines itself as national conservative but also ticks all the boxes characterizing populist radical right parties (Saarts et al., 2021). Whilst, in 2015, it ran primarily on a traditional family values platform and in 2019, on an anti-immigrant platform, its 2023 election campaign focused on a much wider range of socio-economic issues. Their campaign, accusing the Reform Party led government of incompetence and soaring energy prices, was expected to resonate well with voters, as Estonia experienced annual inflation rates of over 20% per year. But as the government subsidies capped energy prices in the winter of 2022–2023, the decrease in purchasing power slowed down and along with the party's spats with Estonia's military leadership, which is one of the most trusted institutions in Estonia (and particularly amongst the more conservative voters), also diminished the appeal of EKRE's protest politics. Whilst EKRE remains a nativist and socially conservative party, their anti-immigrant and anti-gender positions received less resonance, not least because the other parties did not seek confrontation over these topics. This has later been explained with the involvement of a liberal think tank SALK, which had advised the liberal parties to refrain from putting too much emphasis on these topics. A more cultural clash in the Estonian 2023 elections centred around EKRE blaming the 'deep state' for manoeuvring them out of power ahead of the marriage referendum.2 The Centre Party–EKRE–Fatherland coalition ended when prime minister Jüri Ratas resigned over corruption allegations against the Centre Party. In Finland, the three biggest parties – Social Democrats (SDP), National Coalition and Finns Party – all performed better than in the 2019 elections. In accordance with the spirit of the constitution, the leader of the largest party initiates government negotiations. Therefore, the order of the parties at the finish line has great significance. This was especially the case in 2023, where some government coalition options were excluded already before the elections, with the Social Democrats, Green League and Left Alliance refusing government co-operation with the Finns Party. Because the competitive situation amongst the three largest parties was extremely close until the very end, tactical voting rose as a central topic of discussion in the final stages of the campaign. For instance, SDP received votes especially from supporters of Green League and Left Alliance, who tried to maximise the chances of SDP again forming the government (Kestilä-Kekkonen and Sipinen, 2023). Sanna Marin's SDP increased the party vote – Marin was only the third sitting prime minister to have managed to increase the party vote since 1960s – but the election was won by the two main opposition parties, the National Coalition and Finns Party. The National Coalition became the largest parliamentary party for only the second time in its history. National Coalition benefited most from both the economical debate and the decision to apply for NATO membership in 2022. The Finns Party gained over one-fifth of the national poll for the first time in its history. The other parties from Marin's cabinet fared worse: Centre Party's support plummeted to an all-time low, whilst the Green League registered its worst performance since 1995, losing seven seats and seeing a nationwide decrease of 4.5 percentage points. In Helsinki, Green League's loss was even more pronounced at 8.2 percentage points, causing it to relinquish its position as the capital's leading party (Arter, 2024). Left Alliance and Swedish People's Party both lost some of their support, but not as drastically as the Centre Party and the Green League (Table 1). In Estonia, the Reform Party's emphasis on defence issues won them the fifth consecutive election with an all-time record share of the vote. Another clear winner was the also right-wing liberal party Estonia 200 (founded in 2018), which campaigned on a promise of 'a long plan' and 'smarter governance' for Estonia, which entered the parliament for the first time with 13.3% of the vote. Meanwhile, the parties of the conservative coalition of 2019–2021 all lost seats. The left-wing Centre Party lost 10 seats, as its support had been waning since 2019, especially amongst the Russian-speaking voters. The Russian-speaking voters, constituting around a quarter of Estonia's population, have formed the core of Centre Party supporters since early 2000s, as there is no ethnic party (Saarts, 2017). The losses of the Centre Party were likely related to them entering a right-wing coalition, but their appeal with the Russian-speaking voters had been waning since 2016, when Jüri Ratas replaced the charismatic Edgar Savisaar who had been campaigning for friendlier relations with Russia, as leader of the party. Whilst party ratings predicted that EKRE would gain seats until the last stretch of the election campaign, its loss of two seats can imply the backfiring of its defence policy messaging: through criticising the armed forces, the party may have driven away some conservative and pro-military voters. Furthermore, the stabilization of energy prices drained their chances of performing crisis on the economic agenda. Fatherland had been in internal turmoil due to the party's then chairman taking a notably more socially conservative stand compared to his predecessors, which resulted in the expulsion of the rebellious wing from the party, who initiated a competitive party The Rightwingers and competed in the election, scoring 2.3% of the vote, but no seats. The Social Democrats lost one seat compared to 2019, but this was generally viewed as a good result, because the party ratings had been near the electoral threshold of 5% for most of the between-elections period. A surprise contestant was the list of the United Left Party with 2.4% of the vote, which featured candidates of a new movement called Together (Koos/Вместе) who campaigned on a pro-Russian and conspiratory platform. As the United Left has run in the elections for decades without passing the electoral threshold in the 21st century, it ran completely under the radar of national level news coverage. However, it scored 14.9% of the vote in the predominantly Russian-speaking Ida-Viru county. Had it not been for a single candidate (and former member of the Centre Party) Mihhail Stalnuhhin, who ran on a similar platform and scored 15.5% of the vote in the Ida-Viru county, the United Left candidate Aivo Peterson might have scored a personal mandate or the party could have reached above the electoral threshold (Table 2). One indicator suggesting that the referendum-type of campaigning proved effective is the increased turnout in the Estonian elections. In Finland, turnout remained at the same level (72%) as in the previous parliamentary elections in 2019 (72.1%). In the 2023 general election in Estonia, 63.5% of all eligible voted. Whilst official election statistics recorded a 0.2 decrease of electoral turnout due to the changing voter count principles,3 48,756 voters more than in 2019 participated in the election. Estonia's party system is usually characterized as relatively stable, especially in the Central and Eastern European context and, for the past two decades, relatively strongly dominated by the Reform Party. As in many CEE countries, the level of political polarization has been somewhat higher than, for example, in the Nordic countries, and polarization has mainly run along the ethnic cleavage with the main standoff happening between the more Russia-friendly Centre Party and the other parties (Saarts, 2017). However, the past decade has witnessed gradual shifting of the core cleavage from the ethnic issue to the transnational cleavage (Hooghe and Marks, 2018), which separates the liberal voters with pro-globalization views and environmental affinities from those with more traditional, authoritarian and nationalist views. This is manifest primarily in the emergence of EKRE, which entered the parliament in 2015 on the anti-LGBT+ platform and secured the third best result in the 2019 elections mainly on the fears of refugees and migrants from distant cultures being located to Estonia (Ehin et al., 2020). However, the conservative Centre Party–EKRE–Fatherland government coalition raised the level of polarization to new heights and alarmed the more liberal voters. Although EKRE was a junior partner in the coalition, it dominated the public debate by an endless string of talk scandals (i.e., scandals which resulted from their public comments about women, LGBT minorities, public officials, farmers, politicians in other countries, etc., Jakobson, 2024), which allowed to communicate the party's ideological positions. In the 2023 election, the socially liberal parties had consolidated their positions and managed to outperform the conservative parties, which has increased the tensions even further. The polarization is increasingly playing out in the parliament, where obstruction of government-initiated bills has become overwhelming. Whilst proposing hundreds of amendment proposals and taking breaks has been an instrument in Estonian parliamentary politics also in the past, it has not been used on the scale seen in the 2020s. The first major obstruction initiative was taken by the liberal parties, when the Reform Party and Social Democrats submitted around 10,000 amendment proposals to the text of the marriage referendum proposed by the government. However, after the 2023 election, EKRE and the Centre Party initiated obstruction on virtually all government bills which blocked the functioning of the parliament for weeks. To break the stalemate, the government used the legal provisions, which allow to tie motions related to the state budget with the vote of non-confidence and pass the bill with virtually no debate, and the speakers of the parliament used controversial legal provisions to limit the number of breaks and package the amendment proposals to pass them in bulk, which were later approved in an opinion by the Supreme Court. The tensions were also heightened by EKRE's claims that the election was stolen from them through the e-voting system (which has been used since 2005 and was used by more than half of the voters in 2023). Since the party has been critical of e-voting for years, e-voting is less popular amongst their supporters, and thus, more e-votes are cast in favour of the liberal parties. EKRE filed a lawsuit against the legitimacy of the counting procedure for the e-votes, but this was rejected by the Supreme Court. However, the surrounding public debate has undermined the legitimacy of the electoral system, and the obstruction in the parliament reduced trust in parliament (Turu-Uuringute, 2024). Furthermore, EKRE has become an avid advocate of snap elections (which have never occurred in Estonia before) and has proposed calling snap elections on numerous occasions, including during parliamentary obstruction. Whilst the overall trend towards polarization has been similar in Finland, the starting positions differ notably. Finland has been viewed as a country of consensus politics and since the 1980s governed by surplus coalitions, which is unique by European standards (von Schoultz and Strandberg, 2024). As a result, all Finnish parties have been in government in the past 30 years, and at times, governments have brought together opposite political forces such as the Left Alliance and National Coalition. This contrasts with other Nordic countries, as they have often been led by minority governments. More recently however, there are signs of change as conflict around sociocultural issues increases and the traditional three large parties – the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and the National Coalition Party – have become challenged by the breakthrough of the radical-right populist Finns Party. Concurrently, concerns about political and societal polarization have grown (Kekkonen et al., 2024). As Finland has not traditionally had a bloc party structure, voters have almost no idea about the composition of the post-election coalition, which is built after several weeks of negotiations following the parliamentary election (Arter, 2024). Before 2011, this was not perceived as problematic because there was a very stable standing of the parties: three large parties (SDP, National Coalition and the Centre), each having a variable support of 20%–25%. This meant that a coalition of two of these three parties and one or two smaller parties was enough for a majority coalition. However, the Gestalt shift took place in 2011, when the Finns Party increased their support from 4% in 2007 to 19% in 2011. With four parties having 15%–20% support meant that building a majority government became more difficult. As a result, the parties needing to be more vocal of their differences and trying to build closer collaboration with other, even remotely likeminded parties. The main cleavages in Finnish politics have traditionally been the left–right dimension; the language cleavage (Swedish People's Party represents the interests of the Swedish speaking minority); and the rural–urban cleavage. After joining the EU in 1995, the EU integration/national independence dimension has been entwined within the rural–urban dimension. A new cleavage, the socio-liberal–socio-conservative dimension has developed fast and decisively during the past decades. A steep polarization development has taken place during the past decade, dividing the voters into the liberal left and conservative right. However, the emergence of bloc politics started already prior to the 2019 elections, when Juha Sipilä's centre-right government (2015–2019) was deemed too right-wing and conservative by Finnish standards, and the pendulum swung to the left in the 2019 elections. The polycrisis experienced during the centre-left governments of Antti Rinne (until December 2019) and Sanna Marin (2019–2023) only exacerbated these developments. Following the 2023 elections, the governing coalition was formed between the National Coalition, the Finns Party, the Swedish People's Party and the Christian Democrats presided by PM Petteri Orpo. Whilst a typical surplus coalition government by Finnish standards, it faced notable challenges and hard decisions, partly due to the global polycrisis, partly due to the political transformations that began already a few electoral cycles earlier and partly due to the challenges of including a populist radical right party in the government. In Finland, as in all Nordic countries, the level of trust in fellow citizens (interpersonal trust) is very high, which has a positive effect also on political participation. The Nordic countries have a strong civil society based on a broad range of interest groups and citizens' associations and very low level of corruption. Finnish political system is based on a low level of transparency and negotiations between the actors (the government, parliamentary committees, and centralized labour market agreements) take place almost always behind closed doors. Nordic political culture is often categorized as having an emphasis on compromise and consensus. Beginning from the 1930s, the so-called red-green coalitions were formed in all Nordic countries between social democrats and agrarian parties (hence marginalizing extreme alternatives). In Finland, comprehensive income policy agreements, tripartite agreements between Finnish trade unions, employers' organizations, and the Finnish government were made, mostly bi-annually, since 1969. These agreements covered a wide range of economic and political issues, such as salaries, taxation, pensions, unemployment benefits and housing costs. In 2007, the Employers' Federation of Finnish Industries unilaterally abandoned and refused to make any more comprehensive income policy agreements. This not only complicated the triparty negotiation tradition but also created a power vacuum. At the time, little attention was given to the fact that the triparty negotiations did not include merely salaries and working conditions. In practice, for over 40 years, nearly every aspect of Finnish social policy-making has taken place and been governe