The party, which qualifies for €22,500 in state support annually, is now seeing its membership drop below the 500-mark, the level required to qualify as a political party in the first place.

This seems to be the outcome of a semi-hostile takeover from within by the Koos/Vmeste party, which ran jointly in the March 5 elections and nearly won a seat in Narva, and which is pro-Kremlin.

Tartu County Court spokesperson Annett Kreitsman said the EÜVP had lost members in the registry at the Tartu County Court and has been subject to supervisory proceedings since the beginning of May as a result.

The party has been set a deadline of August 9 to correct these deficiencies. "If by the time that deadline expires the party's list does not meet the requirements of the Political Parties Act, then the registry department will apply for compulsory dissolution," Kreitsman said.

As of June 1, the EÜVP has 499 members, ie. one short of the total needed.

Koos/Vmeste leader Aivo Peterson ran for the EÜVP on March 5, and became a person of interest after regularly sending pro-Russian reportages from occupied Donbas, in the run-up to polling day.

After being detained on arrival in Estonia by the Internal Security Service (ISS) days after the election, Peterson fled the country and has vowed to continue to run Koos/Vmeste from exile, in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi.

Koos/Vmeste was incorporated as a party last month, ie. after the election – it was simply a movement, up until that point.

That the EÜVP qualifies for state support is the result of its surpassing, with Koos/Vmeste's help, the 2 percent threshold required.

The party polled at 2.4 percent (14,605 votes) on March 5, higher than the Greens, and it and Parempoolsed, which also passed the 2 percent threshold, qualified for state support, though they did not win seats – 5 percent of the vote in any given constituency is required to do this.

Needless to say, were the party dissolved, it would no longer be eligible for support from the state.

Merje Joll, head of the interior ministry's legal service department chief, said that under the relevant legislation, state support is paid in twelve, monthly installments on the fifth day of every month.

Confusion over registration of members both of the EÜVP and of Koos – to the extent that it might be that some "members" have been unwittingly co-opted as such – has also raised questions about the efficacy of the rules governing political parties in Estonia.

Were the EÜVP to be wound up, it would not be the first time that that had transpired in recent years.

The former Free Party (Vabaerakond) hovered around the 500-members mark ahead of the 2019 election, at a time when it had as many as six Riigikogu seats. The party was nonetheless dissolved soon after that.

Party support is provided in proportion to a party's representation. For instance the Reform Party, the largest party by Riigikogu seats, received €432,623 in state support in the first quarter of 2022 alone.

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