The right-wing populism and the re-emergence of class cleavage in the Baltic States

A number of previous studies have demonstrated that the populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have been surprisingly successful in attracting working-class votes. The trend has also been evident for several countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The current paper explores to what extent the PRRPs in the Baltic States (the Estonian Conservative People’s Party – EKRE, and the National Alliance in Latvia – NA) have managed to mobilize the working-class constituencies. Moreover, the study also attempts to put the Baltic States in a broader CEE context and will examine how the preconditions for the PRRPs in Estonia and Latvia in mobilizing the working-class votes have been somewhat different from those in Poland and Hungary, as the most emblematic cases in the context. The study relies on the data provided by the European Social Survey (2008 and 2018) and employs logistic regression analysis. The results demonstrate that there is little evidence that the PRRPs in Estonian and Latvia have been successful in gaining electoral support from the blue-collar workers, or that the class cleavage has somehow re-emerged in those countries. Only for Latvia, there were some traces of class voting. Nevertheless, the analysis reveals that the two radical right parties in the Baltic States are surprisingly different when it comes to their voters’ profiles. The study also shows that almost all the strategies used by the Polish and Hungarian PRRPs (Fidesz and PiS) for attracting the votes from the working class are largely unavailable or unfeasible in the Baltic context. Thus, the study shows that CEE is much more diverse than one can expect, while it also comes to exploring the PRRP parties and class voting.