Reform Party rejects buying budget votes line by line

Estonia’s Reform Party will not offer individual budget allocations to secure opposition votes, Secretary-General Kristo Enn Vaga said, as the minority government prepares for budget talks and presidential elections, ERR reported.

The governing alliance has 50 votes in parliament after Kalev Stoicescu of Eesti 200 and Reform Party member Meelis Kiili left their parliamentary groups. Vaga said this would not change the government’s objectives, but would require more negotiations with all parliamentary groups and members before bills are put to a vote.

“Minority governments are by no means unprecedented in European politics,” Vaga said on the radio programme Uudis+. He referred to Andrus Ansip’s minority government in Estonia in 2009, after the Social Democrats left the government.

That government introduced the euro and passed large state budgets, Vaga said. “There was no problem. It simply had to talk more with all the parties represented in parliament,” he said.

Vaga also referred to the Aknaaluste faction, the second-largest faction in the Estonian parliament. He said many of its members had chosen a new party, while others had not yet decided their political affiliation. According to Vaga, several had publicly indicated that they were prepared to support any reasonable proposal.

Vaga said the government would therefore need to hold additional discussions with all members of parliament. He added that, although the government formally had a 50-seat minority, none of the opposition parties actually wanted to form a new government.

“We will continue to lead the government and deal with the challenges facing Estonia, from security to the economy,” Vaga said.

He identified the state budget as the government’s most important task. The government must discuss it with all parties to find a solution for approving next year’s budget, he said. The most urgent issue, Vaga added, was the presidential election, with the aim of electing a president in parliament.

Asked whether the Reform Party would have to meet the demands of opposition or unaffiliated lawmakers through individual budget allocations, as Andrus Ansip’s minority government did in 2009, Vaga said it would not buy their votes item by item.

“All parties have said that the budget deficit needs to be reviewed,” Vaga said. He added that the Reform Party’s goal was to reduce the deficit by 0.5 percentage points every year, with the government aiming to meet the Maastricht criteria by 2029.

All parties had said Estonia should move in that direction, Vaga said, and a cross-party agreement had even been proposed. He urged lawmakers to consider what was beneficial for the country rather than what benefited them or their party when deciding how to vote on individual budget items.

Vaga rejected claims that a minority government could become more expensive for citizens or vulnerable to blackmail. He said the most expensive governments for Estonia had been the EKREIKE government and Jüri Ratas’s first government, which brought a budget deficit of 5.2 percent to parliament.

“That was costly, and we are still paying those bills through current budget decisions,” Vaga said. He added that defence spending had since risen from two percent to 5.4 percent and that the Reform Party did not consider national defence an area where spending could be reduced.