Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas steps down to take up top EU diplomat role

HELSINKI (AP) — Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has resigned as the Baltic nation’s leader to become… EU foreign policy chief Later this year.

Kallas, Estonia’s first female prime minister, formally submitted her resignation to President Alar Karis during a brief meeting at the presidential palace in the capital Tallinn on Monday.

Estonia, under Kallas, 47, was one of the Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Europe After the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. She replaces Spain’s Josep Borrell, who has served as the EU’s foreign policy chief since 2019.

In a statement, Karis summed up Kallas’ three-and-a-half years at the helm of a country of 1.3 million people, saying: “It has been a time full of crises, with milestones (such as) the coronavirus, the economic recession and the war in Europe, when Russia destroyed our previous security image with its aggression in Ukraine.”

The prime minister’s move led to the resignation of Kallas’s three-party coalition government, which consists of the center-right Reform Party, the Social Democratic Party and the liberal Estonia 200 party. The government will continue to serve as an interim government until a new government is sworn in, likely in early August.

At the outgoing government’s final meeting on Monday, Kallas stressed her government’s efforts to strengthen the security of Estonia, a NATO member and neighbor of Russia.

“We have invested more in national defence than ever before and increased the annual defence budget to 1.4 billion euros (about $1.5 billion), which is 3% of GDP,” Kallas said, adding that in the past two years the government’s defence budget has increased by about 70%. “These decisions help ensure that Estonia is consistently protected and a safe place to live.”

The Reform Party announced on June 29 that it had selected a veteran party member. Climate Minister Christine Michel As a candidate for prime minister to replace Kallas, who represented Estonia at the NATO summit in Washington last week. Under Kallas’ leadership, the Reform Party won a landslide victory in the 2023 general election and holds a mandate for the prime minister’s office.

The government’s composition is likely to remain the same, but Michal, who is also set to succeed Kallas as head of the Reform Party, is currently in talks with both the Social Democrats and Estonia 200 to review the current four-year government programme that the three parties originally agreed to last year.

Karis and the 101-seat parliament, or Riigikogu, where the coalition has a comfortable majority, must approve Michal’s nomination for Estonia’s top job. He has been climate minister since April last year. The 49-year-old former economy and justice minister has been active in Estonia’s main political establishment, the Reform Party, since the late 1990s.

Michal is known for her long and distinguished political career that focused on Estonia’s domestic affairs but lacks international experience – a stark contrast to Kallas who has excelled in international arenas but has been clearly out of her comfort zone when it comes to domestic politics, leading to a significant drop in her popularity among Estonians over the past year.