Family values foundation collects more than €200,000 in donations
According to daily Eesti Päevaleht, Vooglaid’s Foundation for the Protection of Family and Tradition (SAPTK) managed to collect a total of €212,542 in donations. The foundation used the money to fight the gender-neutral Registered Partnership Act, which included campaigns against MPs that had voted in its favor, the paper wrote.
SAPTK’s founder and president, Varro Vooglaid, wrote in the introduction to the foundation’s annual report that they had run an information campaign to remind people who in the Riigikogu had helped push the Registered Partnership Act through, and who had been against it.
The foundation distributed 400,000 leaflets before the 2015 elections that identified every candidate who had supported the act by name, and also those who had tried to vote it down.
In SAPTK’s annual report, Vooglaid attributed the punch the Reform and Social Democratic parties took in those elections at least partially to his foundation’s efforts, pointing out that they now only had 45 mandates in parliament, compared to their previous 57. Of the 40 MPs that had helped push the act through, only 14 had been reelected, he wrote.
The foundation has been criticized for its incendiary rhetoric and naming and shaming approach to candidates and MPs it doesn’t approve of. Its emergence and increasing popularity has spawned counter movements as well, Salliv Eesti (“Tolerant Estonia”) among others.
Editor: Editor: Dario Cavegn