Women local election candidates in minority in all but 2 of Estonia's municipalities
Women in Estonian politics face bias, lack of support, and fear of public scrutiny, limiting their participation despite their skills and ambitions, Eesti Ekspress reported.
With the notable exceptions of the island of Kihnu and also Põhja-Pärnumaa, women candidates at this year's local elections make up less than half the total of those running in the 79 municipalities nationwide, according to the paper.
Deeply entrenched gender roles, financial barriers, and party dynamics often sideline women, the paper said, drawing on the experiences of several leading women politicians, while the tendency is even for a fall in participation since the peak a few years ago.
Figures quoted by Eesti Ekspress show that Estonia, with women making up 30 percent of MPs at the national legislature, is closer to Latvia and Lithuania's rates (29 percent and 28.4 percent respectively) than those of other Nordic countries such as Sweden (46.4 percent), Norway (46.2 percent), and Finland (45.5 percent), though some way ahead of Hungary's 13.1 percent.
Women make up about half of the members of Estonian political parties, while in terms of actively running, the Social Democrats and Eesti 200 had the most women on their electoral lists at the 2023 Riigikogu elections (at 44 and 39 percent respectively) and had women at the top of one third of their electoral lists, while Isamaa (23 percent) and EKRE (18 percent) ran the smallest proportion of women candidates.
"The more conservative the party, the fewer women there are on the electoral lists," noted Liia Hänni, a veteran politician and astrophysicist and one of the authors of the Estonian Constitution, calling it "a question of democracy" and identifying a shift towards conservatism in the regions which may find its way to the national level too.
As for the local elections, held every four years, the proportion of women candidates rose from a little under 24 percent in 1993, peaking at 40 percent in 2013, though it has actually dropped slightly since then, to 38.4 percent at the last local elections in 2021.
At the current, ongoing local elections, again SDE leads the pack in terms of percentage of women candidates and is the only party where this figure is more than half, albeit only slightly at 51 percent.
Center (43 percent) and Eesti 200 (42 percent) are next, while 37 percent of the Reform Party's candidates are women – and around a third of the more right-wing parties' candidates are women also (Parempoolsed at 33 percent, Isamaa – 32 percent, ERK – 31 percent, and EKRE at 29 percent).
By municipalities, at the current election, Kuusalu, east of Tallinn, has the smallest proportion of women running, at just 22 percent of the 117 candidates. Curiously, given its international reputation as something of a matriarchy, just six of the 20 candidates running on the island of Ruhnu are women.
At the other end of the spectrum, Kihnu, also an island, was one of the few municipalities where more women were running than men – 13 candidates out of 19, or 60 percent, while in Põhja-Pärnumaa and the town of Maardu there is roughly a 50-50 split, with women candidates in Turi, Loksa, Tapa, Raasiku, Kohtla-Järve, and the Tallinn district of Kristiine all a little under 50 percent of the total.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte
