Andrey DemenkovPhoto: Personal archive
With the change of prime minister, Estonia has a chance to change its economic course, where exclusively tactical decisions prevailed, to create a strategic plan and follow it, says journalist and author of the media project “Pribaltaets” Andrei Demenkov. He is convinced that our country needs a strategic approach “absolutely” today.
The coalition led by the Reform Party has been ruling Estonia since January 2021. It was a difficult time: the pandemic was in full swing, and then the energy crisis immediately broke out. The state did not cope with the growing problems very successfully: discontent among businesses and consumers grew.
Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas became increasingly reluctant to engage with the press, which asked more and more uncomfortable questions, which the prime minister often left unanswered.
So when disaster struck and Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was a godsend for Kallas. The strategy became clear and simple: it was enough to take the right position, say nice and correct words and get approval from all sides. Kallas blossomed and filled with energy, and in Europe she soon began to be compared to the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher. The Reform Party, which had always been “pro-business”, became “pro-Ukraine”.
Kallas’s excessive passion for Ukraine (let me immediately point out that the very fact that Estonia should support the victim of Russian aggression is beyond doubt) led to the fact that internal affairs were neglected, the situation in the Estonian economy became one of the worst in the EU: we ended up in a protracted recession.
A gift of fate
An economic crisis has occurred, which has lasted for two years now, and the Estonian government has not yet managed to develop a clear program for exiting it. All decisions were uncertain and half-hearted: let’s take out loans, but not too many, raise taxes, but not too much, and let’s paint an optimistic picture of the future for Brussels, so that it doesn’t scold us too much for the excessive budget deficit. The government solved exclusively tactical tasks, without setting strategic ones.
The fact that Kallas has been appointed as the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and is moving to Brussels is a gift from fate for both her and us. The new prime minister will be Kristen Michal, a person from Andrus Ansip’s circle, who is known to be very unhappy with Kallas’s work as prime minister. Most likely, the economic course will change, will become more clear. But there is no guarantee that fundamental changes are planned.
Michal has been associated with the Reform Party his entire adult life and has never worked anywhere else, which inevitably limits his horizons. On the other hand, in such a position he may be more open to advice from knowledgeable people. Michal could see from the example of Kallas what the unwillingness to listen to others and indifference to the experience of even one’s own entrepreneur husband leads to.
If Ansip influences the new prime minister, then Michal will definitely adjust the government’s course towards more right-wing liberalism. And that’s good, it will benefit the economy. But that’s not enough: I would like the country’s leadership to move from a sluggish tactical response to external irritants to building its own strategic course with a long-term planning horizon.
Find a good target
Estonia once had a super goal – to join the European Union. It gave a powerful impetus to our development not only economically, but also socio-politically. In order to meet the high standards of the EU, we had to do a huge amount of work. But the result was fantastic, and the inertia from that work served us for years after joining the EU.
Finding a task of similar scale is not easy. It must be not only ambitious, but also feasible. In 2007, Andrus Ansip proclaimed the super-optimistic idea of making Estonia one of the five richest countries in Europe – and today it is often remembered with irony.
Estonia would be well-equipped to develop a large-scale multi-year development program of the kind that Ireland periodically adopts, and the practice of which President Lennart Meri has tried to instill in Estonia. There is no doubt: the successful Irish experience is definitely worth paying attention to. But for a start, a more modest task could be chosen.
In the last decade, Estonia was still ahead of Lithuania in terms of gross domestic product per capita, taking into account the purchasing power parity of currencies. But since 2019, we have begun to lag behind our more successful southern neighbor. Isn’t that the goal: to regain leadership in the three Baltic countries by the end of this decade?
It sounds strange: why do we need Lithuania as a reference point, we can simply set the task of accelerating GDP growth?
However, any specific goal works better than a general one. If you compete with a certain country, you will inevitably begin to study its experience, how it achieved a better result (being, in general, in similar conditions)? And in what can you surpass this specific country? This is how they sometimes find quite unexpected recipes for solving their problems. And achieve the set realistic goal.
Source: www.dv.ee
