TALLINN (AFP) - Swedish bank SEB in Tallinn said it is time for Estonia to wake up before swelling unemployment turns into "political dissatisfaction".

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Estonia's emergence from a bleak two-year recession, plus the potential boost of its hoped-for 2011 euro adoption, are little comfort for the swelling ranks of the unemployed in this Baltic state.

After an eight-year boom turned to bust in 2008, the former European Union "tiger" has seen joblessness almost quadruple to 15.5 percent, a level unseen in nearly two decades.

That represents 107,000 of Estonia's 1.3 million people, according to official data released Friday, with one-third of them jobless for at least a year. In addition, 11,000 more have simply lost hope and stopped seeking work, the figures showed.

"I only survive thanks to savings that I collected for years," Mare Varendi, a 47-year-old accountant who lost her job in December 2008, told AFP.

For their first seven months out of work, Estonia's registered unemployed get state benefits worth around half their last salary. Thereafter, the amount falls to 1,000 kroons (64 euros, 88 dollars) a month.

Welfare payments do not cover heating and power bills for even a one-room apartment during the harsh Baltic winter.

Varendi said she had applied for dozens of jobs, including low-paid secretarial work, but saw the situation as hopeless because there are sometimes a hundred other applicants.

A recent poll found that 68 percent of Estonians regard unemployment as the biggest problem the nation faces.

Centre-right Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, at the helm of a biting austerity drive, has faced criticism for comments seeming to belittle the issue -- for example, saying that many of the unemployed are "just" construction workers hit by the end of a building boom.

Ansip has urged the public to remember that welfare was worse during the slump of 1999, after the economy of major trading partner Russia went off the rails.

Varendi claims such remarks show Estonia's leaders are out of touch.

"The only thing that keeps my spirit up is the hope that the crisis will be over in a few years and people like me will be needed by society again," she added.

Unlike other crisis-hit nations, from Greece and Spain in the south to its Baltic neighbours Lithuania and Latvia, Estonia has not seen street protests.

But analyst Hardo Pajula at Swedish bank SEB in Tallinn said it is time to wake up.

"The biggest problem for Estonia -- really the biggest -- is unemployment and the threat that it might turn into increasing political dissatisfaction," he said.

Mart Laar, ex-premier and leader of a junior party in Ansip's two-way coalition, has been a rarity in the government camp in warning that unemployment is a major threat.

At a recent party congress, Laar said the coalition will only hold onto power until the 2011 general election if it can stem unemployment this year.

Finance ministry spokeswoman Kristi Joesaar contested claims that the government was sitting on its hands.

"Financial support for active measures to increase employment have been doubled in this year's budget compared to 2009," she told AFP.

She noted that the ministry had just drafted legislation that would for one year cut the taxes of firms hiring the long-term unemployed in part-time jobs.

Estonia shifted rapidly from a communist command economy to the free market after regaining independence from the crumbling Soviet bloc in 1991.

As recently as the second quarter of 2008, unemployment had fallen to a 16-year low point of 4.0 percent thanks to robust growth, particularly after the country joined the EU in 2004.

But the country tumbled into recession in 2008 as domestic demand withered and the global economic crisis battered exports.

The economy contracted by 14.1 percent in 2009, according to official estimates, after 3.6 percent in 2008. Estonia emerged technically from recession in the fourth quarter of last year with 2.6-percent growth against the previous three months, data showed last week.

The government has said the crisis should ease markedly this year, with a 0.1-percent contraction instead of the feared 2.0 percent, followed by growth of 3.3 percent in 2011 and 3.7 percent in 2012.

For some Estonians, it is hard to wait.

"I would like to stay in Estonia, but at the moment I plan to leave to work in the United States," said Kairi Soosaar, 25, who is about to graduate in media studies.

"Many of my friends have already left to work abroad. I hope to return one day but who knows what life will bring," she added.