The Reform Party won 37 seats in the country’s 101-seat parliament.
Prime minister Kaja Kallasen led by the reform party has won the Estonian parliamentary elections, the country found out public broadcaster ERR (you switch to another service) from election monitoring when all the votes had been counted. The Reform Party collected slightly more than 31 percent of the votes.
The Reform Party got 37 seats in the country’s 101-seat parliament, or Riigikogu, or three more seats.
The Reform Party is a center-right liberal party that has promised to increase Estonia’s defense spending to 3 percent of gross domestic product, reduce corporate taxation, and accept the right to same-sex marriage.
According to Kallas, his party is in a strong position to form a coalition government that would require continuous pressure on Russia.
– We have to invest in security, our aggressive neighbor has not disappeared and will not disappear, so we have to work with it, he told reporters in Tallinn.
The Prime Minister even collected more than 31,000 personal votes.
The biggest loss for the center party
The second most votes were collected by the national conservative Ekre party, which received 17 seats. Ekre, who lost two seats, collected about 16 percent of Estonian votes.
Chairman of Ekr Martin Helme said while the counting of votes was still in progress that he did not trust the electronic votes cast in the elections. ERR’s by (you switch to another service)Pearl wants a recalculation.
Ekre was still in the lead when only paper votes had been counted.
Ekre has long claimed that electronic voting is flawed and should not be trusted. In recent months, however, the party had been more receptive to the voting method.
Kallas told news agency AFP that the reform party would not form a government experiment with Ekre.
– My biggest competitor thinks that we should not help Ukraine, we should not support Ukraine, we should only look for our own interest, Kallas has said, referring to Ekr.
The center party suffered the biggest loss, losing up to ten of its previous 26 seats. The center received more than 15 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections.
Completely new seats were collected by the surprise of the elections, the liberal Eesti 200. Previously, the party did not have a single seat in the parliament, but now Eesti 200 collected 14 seats. The party collected a good 13 percent of the votes.
According to ERR, the voting percentage in the parliamentary elections was 63.5 percent.
Sources: AFP, Reuters, STT