Putin critic seals Estonia election win
KAJA KALLAS, one of Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, has sealed a decisive victory in Estonia’s general election against rivals campaigning to stop military support to Ukraine.
The prime minister’s centre-right Reform Party comfortably beat nearest rivals the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), which campaigned against arms deliveries to Kyiv and to halt refugee arrivals from Ukraine.
Ms Kallas is one of the strongest voices in the EU and Nato, advocating the toughest possible line against Putin and for the maximum support for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Reform won 31.6 per cent of the vote, with runners-up EKRE taking 16 per cent in a country of 1.3 million that borders Russia. Estonia has suffered an inflation crisis since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“This is much better than we expected,” Ms Kallas said, with Reform set to win 37 seats, three more than at the last election in 2019.
Under Ms Kallas’s leadership, Estonia, which emerged from behind the Iron Curtain in 1991 to gain independence, began sending military aid to Kyiv before Russia’s illegal invasion. It amounts to more than one per cent of GDP, which is the biggest of any country relative to the size of its economy.
“I think with such a strong mandate this will not change,” Ms Kallas, 45, said. “We have ruled out a coalition with EKRE and I stand by my words.”
Reform will have to form a coalition with one or more of the parties in the Baltic state’s 101-seat parliament.