Welcome to Narva (Estonia)! This campaign billboard from the EKRE party (Conservative People’s Party of Estonia) claims (in Russian, not Estonian) that the party will “defend children from LGBT propaganda in kindergartens and schools.”

As the person who posted this on social media explains (in Estonian), among other things the billboard violates the country’s language laws, which dictate that all such ads include text in Estonian that is displayed just as prominently.

Nearly twenty-five percent of the Estonian population is “Russian” — that is, Russophones who moved to the country when it was occupied by the Soviet Union and their descendants. For good or for ill, many of these “accidental” colonizers never bothered to learn Estonian, and the language divide persists there to this day, exploited by nationalists on both sides of the border.

Although I believe that if you deliberately avoid learning the majority language in the country where you live, insisting on your right to speak only the language of the former colonial/occupying power, you are making a very pointed political statement. When it gets entangled with homophobia, etc., that statement becomes altogether obnoxious. Especially when it’s made on behalf of Estonian fascists.

Thanks to the ever-vigilant Raiko Aasa for the heads-up. ||| TRR

[EKRE] has also been labelled “far-right” by Kari Käsper, the Executive Director of Estonian Human Rights Centre, and in foreign media by BBC News and the Christian Science Monitor. According to Fox News Channel, EKRE is a far-right party, “considered by some to have Fascist-Neo-Nazi sympathies similar to many other flourishing nationalist parties in the Baltics and Eastern Europe.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called EKRE youth organization’s annual torchlight procession an “extreme right march.”