The parties that make up Estonia’s ruling coalition were crushed in the local elections by the party supported by the country’s Russian-speaking population. This may spell trouble – and a change in policy – for the parliamentary elections due in two years.
The Russian-speaking population felt pushed aside, so it rallied under the Centrist flag
The October local elections revealed what had long been obvious: the popularity of the current government is extremely low, while the opposition is gaining strength.
On the eve of the elections, opinion polls predicted a sweeping victory for the opposition parties: according to Norstat ratings, the Centre Party and Fatherland were leading across the country. In the northern regions with a large Russian-speaking population, including Tallinn, the centrists were the undisputed leaders. The party had seemed doomed just a couple of years ago, after a high-profile corruption conviction led many prominent members to resign — so basically, at the local elections, it managed to rise from its ashes.
The Centre Party came second nationwide, losing only to electoral alliances. In Tallinn, the centrists also celebrated a convincing victory, gaining 41.7% of the votes and overtaking the ruling Social Democrats. This success was largely due to the mobilization of the Russian-speaking population dissatisfied with the decisions of the national authorities.
The most obvious reason was the decision to strip Russian citizens living in Estonia of their right to vote in municipal elections. Often these are members of the same family who have lived in the country for decades but hold different passports — and, as of recently, different voting rights. Another source of discontent among Russian speakers was the reform of Russian-language education: in theory it was meant to eliminate segregation, but in practice the transition of Russian schools to instruction in Estonian not only damaged education quality but also left many professional Russian teachers unemployed.
In Tallinn, a special reason for dissatisfaction among Russian speakers was the renaming and reorganization of several cultural institutions operating in Russian. In June the Russian Theatre, funded by the Ministry of Culture, was renamed Südalinna Theatre, after the central district where it is located. The reason for the change was quite clear: amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, names containing the word “Russian” became unwelcome.
Historically, this is a familiar phenomenon: at the very beginning of World War I, Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd to eliminate even a hint of the “German spirit.” The same fate befell Tallinn’s Russian Theatre and the Russian Cultural Centre — whose new name, it seems, no one in the capital even remembers. In September, the Russian theatre’s familiar sign disappeared from its facade, and earlier, Soviet-era symbols were removed from the Russian Cultural Centre building.
The changes did not stop there: the Ministry of Culture, controlled by the prime minister’s party, significantly reduced the funding of the former Russian Theatre — by 15.5%. As a result, in September the institution was forced to lay off eight actors and administrative staff. Among those dismissed were well-known local theatre stars who were popular with the Russian-speaking audience.
A few days later, two of the dismissed actresses, Larisa Savankova and Ekaterina Kordas, announced that they would run in the elections as candidates for the Centre Party — the only major political force in Estonia led by a Russian-speaking politician, Mihhail Kõlvart, who is also a former mayor of Tallinn. “Unfortunately, we are witnessing a deliberate and cynical destruction of something that holds immense value for a significant part of the population, while society is being deprived of its last chance to find common ground,” Savankova told ERR.
The significance of this pre-election event was immediately recognized by the city’s mayor, Social Democrat Jevgeni Ossinovski, who declared the city government’s readiness to assist the dismissed actors.
The actresses, however, did not make it into the city council, but the party managed to win 37 seats in the election, more than half of which went to Russian-speaking politicians. Nevertheless, this was not enough to secure a majority — especially since the Social Democrats achieved a record result, as many of the Centre Party’s traditional voters had been stripped of their voting rights.
Estonia’s pro-EU, pro-Ukraine parties risk losing power altogether
The fate of Tallinn’s future coalition now lies in the hands of the right-conservative Fatherland party, which received offers from both Centre Party leader Mihhail Kõlvart, and Tallinn’s current mayor, Social Democrat Jevgeni Ossinovski. To form a coalition without the centrists, the Social Democrats would have to join forces with almost all the other parties that crossed the electoral threshold — which may be a bit complicated given their complicated relationship and recent disputes with the Reform Party (which is the senior partner in a national ruling coalition that includes the Social Democrats).
As for another ruling party, Estonia 200, it suffered a crushing defeat in the elections: the education minister’s party managed to show a tolerable result only in Tartu and failed to enter Tallinn’s city council.
The protest vote was even more evident in Narva. The deprivation of Russian citizens’ voting rights hit hardest in this border region, where the overwhelming majority of the population is Russian-speaking. More than 35% of Narva residents voted for the People’s List of Mihhail Stalnukhin — a former centrist expelled from the party three years ago after he declared that those who demolish Soviet war memorials are Nazis and called members of the government and Prime Minister Kaja Kallas (Reform Party) fascists.
The Centre Party came in second in Narva, receiving less than a third of the votes; in third place was the electoral alliance of incumbent mayor Katri Raik, while another alliance formed by the new party Plan B gained 12.8%. This political force nominated as its mayoral candidate Urbo Vaarmann, a former Centre Party MP once convicted of bribery and fraud. That did not stop Plan B from running in Narva under the slogan: “We are not politicians and officials who have sat in offices for decades. We are ordinary residents of Narva: workers, teachers, entrepreneurs, young people, pensioners. We are you!” This strategy — and the reliance on the forgetfulness, or rather, unawareness, of Narva voters — proved successful. Plan B managed to take votes away from another opposition and openly pro-Russian party, Koos (Together). Koos might have had a real chance of success if voting rights had been preserved for everyone, but under the new circumstance it only got 4% of the vote in Narva. However, the party had pinned its main hopes on Tallinn, where its mayor candidate was Aivo Peterson, currently imprisoned on suspicion of treason. Yet even in the capital, the party failed to achieve any success.
The only municipality where Koos had some reason to celebrate was the mining town of Kohtla-Järve in northeastern Estonia. There, the party — whose platform advocates friendly relations with Russia — became the third most popular political force, winning three of the 25 council seats. However, the Centre Party maintained sole leadership there as well, just as in several other Russian-speaking towns — including Sillamäe in Ida-Viru County, where it achieved 80.9% of the vote.
The local elections once again confirmed that, unless something unforeseen happens in the next two years, it will be difficult for Estonia’s ruling parties to retain power when parliamentary elections are held. Given its current ratings, Estonia 200 risks disappearing, while the Reform Party may be forced to change its leadership. Although there is no talk yet of the prime minister’s resignation, the board of the party’s Tallinn branch has already stepped down.
The coalition choice that Fatherland makes in the capital will indicate what Estonia’s government could theoretically look like two years from now. The most “Russian” and the most “Estonian” of the country’s major political parties have previously governed together — when the Centre Party was led by Jüri Ratas, who in this election ran as a candidate for Fatherland. How such an alliance would affect both parties’ reputations in today’s climate — when anything Russian is, to put it mildly, unfashionable, and Fatherland’s rhetoric toward Russian speakers is far from gentle — is another question.
