Electoral system
The Estonian Parliament, the Riigikogu similar to Hungarian, a chamberlain, 101 representative takes a seat in it. During the parliamentary elections, the country is divided into 12 constituencies, which can send a number of representatives to the horseshoe in proportion to their population.
The electoral system works on the principle of proportionality, Direct election of 75 representatives, including the Single Transfer Vote (SVT – Individual Transferable Vote) principle, he gets his mandate, the rest 26 seats can be obtained by fractional votes.
The interesting thing about the Estonian electoral system lies precisely in the SVT system. Voters cast two votes in their residential district: a primary and a secondary preference vote.
If a representative collects more secondary preference votes than the candidate who received the most primary votes, the former wins the mandate.
Party system
In this year’s elections nine parties and ten independent candidates he will measure himself. Six of the nine starting parties currently have a mandate in the parliament:
- Kaja Kallas is a center-right liberal Reform with 34 mandates has
- Marked by the name of the former prime minister, Jüri Ratas, it is moderately pro-Russian and center-left Centrum (Kesk) with 23 mandates
- The right-wing populist Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) 19-Target
- The right-wing one Isamaa with 11 seats can currently
- THE Social Democrats nine they take up space
- Also centre-right, mainly composed of former Isamaa members Parempoolsed (The Right) as the youngest member of the Riigikogu a mandate owns
In addition, the liberal center party, which just slipped below the five percent threshold in the last election, is running again Estonia 200the Greensand the mainly Russians from Estonia, less than 1% United Left too.
In the Estonian party system, it does happen that one party can obtain a governing majority on its own (this happened in the case of Centrum in 2019 as well), it is more typical for the parties that win the majority to form coalitions. These coalitions are usually quite colourful, the centre-right Reform party, which is currently in the government’s majority, formed an alliance with the centre-left Center during the first period of its government, and after the dissolution of the coalition, the right-wing Isamaa and the Social Democrats entered into a coalition with the government party.
What do the numbers show?
Two days before the elections, it seems that Kallas should not really worry about his own party, but rather about the smaller actors of the currently existing coalition.
Estonian election researchers agree that Reform is still the strongest parliamentary partythey are expected to take 25-30 percent of the votes.
There is much more competition for second place, where it is easy to imagine that it is currently referred to as the second largest party Centrum is pushed back, and his position was often described as extreme right the nationalist-populist Conservative People’s Party will take over.
The Isamaa will get worse according to most research 6-9% of votes are currently predicted for them, compared to their 11.4% result four years earlier. The Social Democratic Party is probably similar to the previous onebetween 9-11% can count on the number of votes, at the same time, Estonia 200 can be a big returner, who can even compete for the title of the third largest party.
Parempoolsed, which currently has one mandate in parliament, the Greens, and the United Left, as of now, will not get a mandate.
Cover photo: Kaja Kallas, Prime Minister of Estonia. Source: Peter Kollanyi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
