Kaja Kallas, a former competition lawyer and member of the European Parliament, is just the sort of businesslike politician one expects in Estonia. She took over as leader of Estonia’s liberal Reform Party last year; polls show it in a dead heat with the ruling Centre Party. She has run a technocratic campaign, focusing on education and tax policy. But she loses her cool when she talks about EKRE, Estonia’s anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic populist party. “They want to destroy everything,” she says: all the institutions that have made her open, tech-savvy nation more successful than “other countries that had the same starting-point. Take Moldova, for example.”
Indeed, take Moldova. Like Estonia, it declared independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. Both tiny countries have big Russian minorities, and both have struggled with emigration and shrinking populations. Yet in many ways they are polar opposites. Estonia joined the European Union in 2004 and the euro zone in 2011; Moldova’s EU candidacy has ground to a halt. Transparency International deems Estonia squeaky-clean, the 18th-least-corrupt country in the world. Moldova is 117th. Estonia is an IT hub, Moldova a farm economy whose pride is its excellent wines. Adjusted for purchasing power, Estonians are five times richer than Moldovans.
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