The Centre Party has won the Estonian local council elections in the capital, Tallinn, while Isamaa has ended an almost 30-year reign of the Reform Party in Tartu.
The Centre Party, led by the former mayor of Tallinn, Mihhail Kõlvart, won 37 seats in the Tallinn City Council – one less than in the last election, but still confidently winning the election. The Social Democrats came second with 17 seats (up from six), Isamaa third (11 seats; up from five), the Reform Party fourth with eight seats (down from 15), and Rightwingers, a relatively new party, came fifth with six seats.
The populist Estonian Conservative People’s Party – known as EKRE – failed to meet the five per cent threshold to be elected in the Tallinn City Council, as did the Eesti 200, one of the parties in the governing coalition in the Estonian goverment.
The Tallinn City Council has 79 seats, so the Centre Party’s result may be victorious, but should the other parties in the council agree upon a coalition, Centre may still be left to remain in the opposition. As of the time of writing this article, it wasn’t clear who would be forming the coalition in the capital.
The right of centre Isamaa party, however, delivered a major upset in Estonia’s second largest town, Tartu, by winning 16 seats in the town council against the Reform Party’s 15. Previously, Isamaa had just five seats in the Tartu Town Council and the Reform Party had 19. That means that for the first time in 27 years, Tartu may get a coalition led by someone else than Reform Party – and a mayor from another party, too.
Reform punished by the electorate
Isamaa’s candidate for the mayor of Tartu is Tõnis Lukas who has already served as the town’s mayor from 1996 to 1997. Now, almost 30 years later, he’s in all likeliness about to take the reigns again.
When looking at the country as a whole, different non-partisan blocs took the majority of the vote. These non-partisan blocs are normally based in a single local council and they’re formed to participate in one local council’s election only, representing the issues of the council they’re formed in. These different blocs garnered 23.9 per cent of the vote.
The Centre Party was second in the overall result, having gotten 21.1% of the nation’s vote. Isamaa came third with 18.6% and the Reform Party fourth with 10% of the vote, down from 17.3% in the last election. The Reform Party, the leading political force in the country’s coalition government, seemed to have been punished by the voter for significant faux pas’ in both Tallinn during the summer of 2025, and also on the government level.
Altogether, 59.3 per cent of the electorate casted their vote in the 2025 local council elections.
