Estonia Is Getting Its First Female Prime Minister, Hopefully…
2019 Estonian parliamentary election concluded with an overriding victory by the Reform party. While the far-right support doubled. What to do about that?
After months of work by the 10 parties and 18 individual candidates, the results are in. Fortunately, the liberal, pro-business Reform party has won with 28.8% of the votes. Growing their mandates by 4 seats, compared to 2015. Giving them a chance to put together the next parliament of Estonia. And their mission has to be jumpstarting the innovation in Estonia before it’s too late.
Altogether five parties got to the parliament — leaving out the Freedom Party who was in four years ago. Also, the new up-and-coming Eesti 200 did not manage to exceed the electoral threshold. So all in all, the following parties got a chance to represent their voters:
- Reform Party — 28.8% and 34 mandates (4 more than in 2015)
- Center Party — 23.1% and 26 mandates (1 less than in 2015)
- Conservative People’s Party AKA the far-right guys — 17.8% and 19 mandates (12 more than in 2015)
- Pro Patria — 11.4 % and 12 mandates (2 less than in 2015)
- Social Democrats — 9.8% and 10 mandates (5 less than in 2015)
In case all goes well for the Reform in the coalition negotiations then we will see one of two outcomes:
- Reform-Pro Patria-Social Democrats coalition with strong 56 seats at the parliament
- Reform-Center coalition with even stronger 60 seats at the parliament (but more concessions)
Regardless of the outcome, these two would give Estonia two great results. First, we would get our first female prime minister — entering the more equal future. Second, we would be able to fight off the far-right anti-immigration party.
There is still a chance that all goes sideways but as of now, we can only hope for the best.
However, their main challenge will be unifying the people of Estonia. They have already promised to make the whole education system to be Estonian first. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of talk about finally trying to integrate the Estonian-Russians to society. But even more, we need to figure out how to spread the IT-success story to the people outside of Tallinn and Tartu.
Coming from Pärnu, the city in the county where the far-right party got the most votes, I see one big problem. And the problem is that there is no innovation happening there. The city only has survived on tourism, while there are almost no startups and only some factories.
The same goes for most other regions across the country. In those places, most of the people still work for the government, service industry or outdated factories. They might have heard about Skype, Transferwise and Taxify. But they cannot even use the services for the latter. Not to mention that wealth has not reached there.
That said, they do not need more social credits. But a way to be involved in this new economy — to feel protected and useful. And that’s something we need to figure out — how to get them involved. Once we do, we can unify the country and work towards becoming the leading innovation country.
Good luck in finding the solution and working out a way to decrease the power the far-right anti-immigrants currently have!
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