Provisional list of elected MPs publishes
The provisional list of 101 Riigikogu members who won seats at Sunday's election is online.
Please note that the list is not only pending full confirmation of the result, but in any case will change, as not all those elected will take up their seats.
Most obvious among them is Prime Minister Kaja Kallas (Reform). While she won a seat – with 31,821 personal votes in fact, a record number for a single candidate in Estonia – her party tallied 37, meaning a coalition without Reform looks distinctly unlikely.
In that case, Kallas would have to surrender her Riigikogu seat, to return as prime minister.
The same would be true of all government ministers appointed to posts, since ministers do not sit at the Riigikogu.
Other roles which are incompatible with sitting at the Riigikogu and so would require a choice on the part of those that held them, but who had won a seat, include: City government leaders and council chairs, the Riigikogu speaker, MEPs and heads of some state agencies.
On the other hand, MPs may hold local municipal council seats – and indeed around half of them have done in recent times.
That candidates run for the Riigikogu and win a seat, with no intention of taking it up, can easily be explained by Estonia's electoral system.
This lends itself to "vote magnets", popular figures, often not even from the world of politics as such, running high up on a party's list. Excess votes they obtain after clinching a seat can be distributed further down a party's list (compensation mandates) and allow those who had not won a seat in their own right, to do so.
Also, when an elected MP vacates their seat, for instance when appointed to one of the roles outlined above, the next candidate in an ordered list not to have won a seat, takes up that vacated seat.
In practice this is nearly always a candidate from the same party, though there have been exceptions.
Should the original seat-holder return to the Riigikogu – for instance if leaving government office for any reason – the alternate MP must make way for them. The XIII Riigikogu, the composition before last, saw more of this kind of musical chairs than the recently dissolved XIV Riigikogu.
In any event, the full, official list published by the State Electoral Committee (VVK) is here, so you can see if anyone you know got elected.
The VVK has also published the provisional allocation of the three types of mandates (ie. seats): Personal, district and compensation.
There are nine personal mandates (seven from the Reform Party, two from Center), going to those candidates who beat the voting quota needed to win such a mandate; there are 66 district mandates, as awarded in each of the 12 electoral districts, and 26 compensation mandates, distributed nationally.
By comparison, in 2019 the division was 13 personal mandates, 68 district mandates and 20 compensation mandates.
How these are divided up depends on voters registered and actual votes cast on the day.
More on how Estonia's electoral system works is here, and on the formation process of a coalition, here.
Incidentally and as an aside, once the XV Riigikogu takes office, seating is allocated in alphabetical order by surname, so MPs can get an idea who their deskmate is likely to be, for the next four years, ahead of that.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte