Disgruntled Diasporas? Transnational Populist Mobilization Strategies and Outcomes

In the era of the spread of external voting rights (e.g. Collyer 2014, Lafleur 2015), more and more populist parties have begun to attract the vote of its citizens abroad. In addition to parties-in-government who have extended external voting rights themselves (e.g. Fidesz from Hungary and AKP from Turkey), which often mobilize support via centralized campaigns, there are also ‘challenger parties’ that have attempted to mobilize their supporters, using strategies rather resembling social movement organizations (e.g. Golden Dawn from Greece and EKRE from Estonia). This paper will analyze the mobilization attempts of EKRE, a radical right wing political party in Estonia, which entered Estonian parliamentary politics only in 2015 and in the 2019 elections, already received the largest share of votes cast at Estonian embassies and overall, got the third best result in the elections. The party, running on a nativist and eurosceptic platform has established two branch organizations abroad and has several online proxies targeted at Estonian external voters. The paper will draw on various sources of empirical material, including interviews with party activists abroad, netnography in social media groups of Estonians abroad, content analysis of politically aligned diasporic webzines and interviews with Estonian external voters. The analysis will focus on the party’s transnational mobilization strategies as well as their impact on the transnational Estonian society in terms of political engagement on the individual level as well as from the perspective of community cohesion.