Hey everyone this is Jonathan Cape Heart and this is a special edition of

Cape Up coming to you from the Brussels Forum hosted by the German Marshall

Fund in the Belgian capital.

My guest, Kirstikalulite, the president of Estonia,

a Baltic nation whose worries about a resurgent Russia

are tempered by its faith in NATO and democracy.

President Kirstie Caluylite of Estonia, thank you very much for being on the podcast today.

Welcome. So during a discussion about populism here at the Brussels Forum you made an

impassioned plea or an argument for democracy and among the things you said and I'm paraphrasing here

We must protect democracy democracy is not about having the ability to buy more democracy is about freedom of speech and some other things that you said elaborate on that

When I was sitting in Munich conference actually a couple of weeks ago and I heard some people saying that we need a

perspective of more prosperous future to make sure our country is free

has a rule of law that will be total media freedom etc. And suddenly don't at me that these things

are not at all interrelated. You can have freedoms at every level of prosperity and I think that's the important thing to say in the nowadays world

when we have doubts whether our children and grandchildren actually will be richer than we were.

There are many places in the world where people are sure that they are.

For example, if you look at generation back in China, people were far worse off than they are now.

If you look at the population of Eastern Europe, people are actually doing quite nicely also financially.

But all this movement up or down the property ladder should not affect people's ability to live

in democracy and that is very important to me. Keep this in mind

whatever your complaints are to your society you can voice these complaints that's

very important. What impressed me about your your impassioned defense of democracy, maybe it was because of my understanding the history of Estonia being a country that had been dominated by the Soviet Union.

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