Seeing the radical right movement parties as vanguard activist parties: The case of EKRE in Estonia

Researchers often struggle to classify some radical right-wing parties, which, on the one hand, may act as regular electoral-orientated parties but, on the other, are actively engaged in protest politics, using social movement tactics even between elections. Furthermore, instead of having the fluid structure of a typical movement party, those parties have developed relatively centralized and well-institutionalized party organizations reminiscent of modern mass parties. They may also have a multi-faceted relationship with the adjacent nativist-conservative movement, which they often seek to dominate. Thus, the described parties look neither typical movement parties (as we have seen them on the left) nor regular electoral parties. Nonetheless, the recent conceptual innovations by Alejandro Peña (2021), who coined the term "activist parties", by Kenneth Roberts (2015) and Donatella Della Porta et al. (2017), who proposed the vanguard model (a case when a party seeks to control an adjacent movement) and by Manuela Caiani and Ondřej Císař (2019) who further elaborated the typology for the party–movement interactions, allow us to propose a new movement party sub-type more suitable for the radical right. The current paper suggests calling those parties "vanguard activist parties". The proposed paper outlines the major features of a vanguard activist party and further applies the preliminary theoretical model to the Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE). EKRE has not only acquired all the controversial features described earlier, but the party is clearly a "rising star" among the populist radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe, obtaining ca 17-19% of votes in the recent national elections. Nonetheless, the author seeks a wider contribution than just finding a better theoretical classification for EKRE. The conceptual model outlined will allow us to categorize and analyze similar parties in the "grey zone" across Europe. For example, the studies on Fidesz and Jobbik in Hungary (Pirro and Gattinara, 2018; Metz and Vanagy, 2021) and the AfD in Germany (Heinz and Weisskirchen, 2021) indicate that the proposed "vanguard activist party" model could be (with some reservations) applicable to them as well. Thus, although EKRE remains the paper's main empirical focus, the wider empirical applicability of the new model will also be reflected upon. The paper will rely on qualitative methodology while employing semi-structured interviews with the EKRE's party members and movement activists. The interviews will be supplemented by the media and social media content analysis. The proposed paper seeks to address one of the key objectives of the section, in which the novel concepts are sought to better capture the features of Radical Right politics in the 21st century. We hope the "vanguard activist party" might serve as a novel concept, linking parties and movements, street-level activism, and institutionalized party politics. The paper may fit in the panels: "Framing the radical right in the 21st century in Western democracies and beyond" or "Radical right mobilization in time and space and movement-countermovements".