From a cartel party to a mass party, and further, towards a new type of movement party. The peculiar transformations of the Estonian radical right

The radical right Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE) has experienced several surprising transformations during its relatively short history. While founded in 2012, it was a successor party of a mainstream agrarian party, People’s Union, which was often described as a typical cartel party (Saarts, 2015). While actively recruiting the new activists, expanding the mass-membership-based party organization on the ground, and developing a well-articulated ideology to inspire the activist core, EKRE has become to resemble a modern mass party, as the recent analysis by Saarts et al. (2021) demonstrates. Nonetheless, lately, EKRE has gradually acquired several features which bring it close to a movement party: the party leaders actively seek to harness the political energy of the emerging national-conservative social movement, which is focused on traditional values, spreads anti-globalization messages, and has recently adopted the anti-vaccination agenda. Nevertheless, the movement is still relatively amorphous, with few prominent figureheads. Thus, the EKRE’s leaders actively seek to become the main spokespersons of the movement by themselves. They carefully cultivate relationships with the conservative NGOs; they have organized several joint protest activities, and EKRE has successfully launched online platforms (social media groups, webzines) to mobilize conservative activists. Nevertheless, while doing so, the party has still retained formal membership rules, a well-institutionalized internal structure that is relatively centralized but offers several avenues for grassroots activism and participatory practices. Furthermore, the study by Jakobson, et al. (2021) shows that EKRE has even invested in activities abroad while establishing a branch in Helsinki and has been quite effective in mobilizing the Estonian emigrants living in Finland. The current paper seeks to contribute primarily to the workshop’s objective No. 1 while “clarifying the definitional traits of movement parties and develop a typological understanding”. Here the study on the EKRE’s case may offer valuable material. First, the party has undergone several transformations (cartel > mass > movement party), which raises the question of how those former organizational layers could affect an emerging movement party and its strategies/organization. It seems that the successor party phenomenon, in particular, has remained understudied in the context. Second, it is still not clear which type of movement party EKRE really is when a well-organized mass-party attempts to capture an emerging, fluid, social movement and makes it serve its own political goals? Is it the “party-driven movement” model described by Mudoorn and Rye (2020), but in a multi-party system? EKRE seems very similar to Jobbik (Pirro and Castelli Gattinara, 2018), but that relevant party type has also remained under-conceptualized. Third, the transnational dimension (the Finnish branch) would open new avenues for research on movement parties. Nonetheless, because EKRE has recently become the most popular party in Estonia, the paper will also briefly address the third objective of the workshop while studying the prospects of democratic backsliding, increasing polarization, and the EKRE’s impact on the other parties. The proposed study will predominately rely on qualitative methodology: the interviews with party officials and movement activists will be supplemented with the document and media analysis.