Estonia’s New Govt Minister Will Oppose EU Integration

Martin Helme told Britain’s Financial Times he would continue to use the gesture as a sign of defiance to “left-wing radicals who want to hijack language.”

He also defended a previous statement that “What is racist in Europe nowadays is the replacement of indigenous people. That is pure racism,” as well as negative comments on African immigration which he said had been  “taken out of context.”

“I am not a racist. People who refuse to participate in collective national suicide through immigration are labelled racist,” Helme insisted.

“We don’t want to be replaced in Estonia with foreigners,” he elaborated in another interview.

“[It] does not make any difference whether they are from Ukraine or from Nigeria… They are not Estonians.”

POLITICO: EU Free Movement Drains Little Latvia of One-Fifth of Its Population #MassEmigration https://t.co/g21rW1FXFr

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 7, 2018

The EKRE leader’s past comments, while blunt to the point of insensitivity by the standards of Western Europe, might be better understood in the wider context of the Baltic states’ dire demographic situation.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all have very small populations hovering around 1-3 million — including sizeable Russian minorities transplanted to their countries by Communist regimes while they were subsumed in the Soviet Union, to better erode their sense of national identity.

Since they joined the European Union and acceded to its Free Movement pact, all have experienced mass emigration crises — with Lithuania being literally decimated by the outflow of some 12 per cent of the population over just ten years, for example — threatening their very existence as viable nation-states over the long term.

Story cited here.

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