What struck me most in the seminar by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Sigrid Merx was not simply the theatricality of Unified Estonia, but the unsettling precision with which it staged the conditions that make political reality believable. Rather than parodying politics from a distance, the project operated as if it were a real political party—complete with rhetoric and media presence—to challenge the rise of populism in Europe. The result was not illusion in the sense of deception, but something more generative: a space in which participants could experience how political belief is produced.

This is where the concept of subversive affirmation becomes crucial. As Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse describe, subversive affirmation works by fully inhabiting and reproducing dominant discourses while simultaneously exposing their underlying structures (Arns and Sasse 2006, 445). The power of Unified Estonia lies precisely in this doubling: it affirms the aesthetics and mechanics of political organization so convincingly that it reveals their constructedness. It is precisely this full commitment to form—its rhetoric, aesthetics, and organization—that enables participants to recognize how political parties themselves are constructed, unsettling the distinction between the fictional party on stage and the realities of political practice.

What interests me further is how this “as if” structure resonates with Tim Ingold’s discussions of environmental conditions in pastoral studies. As cited by Nick Seaver (2022, 71), Ingold describes how researchers create environments that attract and guide creatures in order to study their behavior. These are not passive spaces, but carefully designed conditions that elicit participation. In this sense, Unified Estonia functions less like a traditional performance and more like a staged environment that draws people into participation. Like other forms of theater, it organizes attention, affect, and expectation—but here these techniques are mobilized outside of the theater not just to represent politics, but to provoke reflection on how political engagement is produced.

This connection clarifies a broader question: what kinds of realities do contemporary political parties or algorithmic systems construct, and how might these realities be challenged or reconfigured? Although Unified Estonia was publicly framed as a theatrical experiment from the outset, its sustained realism blurred this distinction in practice. The force of the project lies not in representing politics, but in enacting the conditions that make it believable. As the performance unfolded, audiences, media, and participants engaged with it in ways that made its status increasingly ambiguous, revealing how easily political form can generate traction—even when its constructed nature is known.

What Unified Estonia ultimately makes visible is not a hidden truth behind politics, but the conditions through which it becomes convincing. By fully inhabiting the form of a political party, the project shows how quickly belief, participation, and traction emerge from recognizable structures—even when their constructed nature is known. In doing so, it shifts critique toward understanding how realities are actively produced, prompting reflection on the many simulations that shape what we take to be real.