Kaja Kallas, who has led Estonia for three and a half years and has been a prominent supporter of Ukraine, has officially stepped down as Prime Minister to become the European Union’s foreign policy chief later this year.
Kallas, Estonia’s first female prime minister, submitted her formal resignation to President Alar Karis on Monday (July 15) during a brief meeting at the Presidential Palace in Tallinn.
Under her leadership, Estonia, with a population of 1.3 million, has been one of Europe’s most vocal supporters of Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Reflecting on her tenure, President Karis remarked, “It has been a time full of crises, marked by the coronavirus pandemic, economic recession, and the war in Europe, with Russia’s aggression in Ukraine altering our security landscape.”
Kallas’s last significant duty as Prime Minister was representing Estonia at a NATO summit in Washington, D.C., last week.
In her new role, Kallas will succeed Josep Borrell of Spain, who has served as the EU’s foreign policy chief since 2019.
Her departure automatically triggered the resignation of her three-party Cabinet, which includes the centre-right Reform Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the liberal Estonia 200 party. The coalition will serve as a caretaker government until the new Cabinet is sworn in at the end of July or early August.
On June 29, the Reform Party announced that it had chosen party veteran and Climate Minister Kristen Michal as the candidate to replace Kallas as Prime Minister. Michal’s nomination must be approved by President Karis and the 101-seat parliament, known as the Riigikogu, where the coalition holds a comfortable majority.
Michal, who has been serving as the Minister for Climate Affairs since April 2023, is a 49-year-old former economics and justice minister who has been active in the Reform Party, Estonia’s key political establishment, since the late 1990s.
EUnews