ISSN: 2560-1601 Vol. 21, No. 1 (EE) Sept 2019 Estonia political briefing: Entering a new political season E-MAP Foundation MTÜ 1052 Budapest Petőfi Sándor utca 11. +36 1 5858 690 Kiadó: Kína-KKE Intézet Nonprofit Kft.
[email protected] Szerkesztésért felelős személy: Chen Xin Kiadásért felelős személy: Huang Ping china-cee.eu 2017/01 Entering a new political season It is a very well-known bit of common knowledge that a day of summer (let alone a summer vacation period) is considered ‘sacred’ in a Nordic country. Arguably, this approach is fully applicable to the particular case of Estonia – in general, the 2019 summer was relatively quiet as compared to the very turbulent post-elections spring. Even thought the current governmental coalition is in a survival mode, cohesion wise, but the second Jüri Ratas-led Estonian Government still ‘lives on’, having battled its way through the very difficult months. At the same time, there is a certain cost that the coalitional partners have had and will continue having to pay due to some reputational losses – evidently, it is applicable to each of the three political parties (the ‘centrists’, Isamaa, and EKRE), which make up the current Government. The most recent public poll that was carried out in August showed that “[t]he combined support for the three-party […] coalition […] was 38.4%”1 only, a massive drop from the elections-bound results back in March 2019. On the background of this development, the main oppositional party in the country – the Reform Party – scored 36.8% alone (up a bit more than 2% if compared to the July-recorded results), while the other major member of the current Estonian parliamentary opposition – the Social Democratic Party – made a noticeable improvement as well, reaching 13% of public support in August2.