Party chairman and prime minister, Jüri Ratas, said on Sunday evening that Kõlvart’s extraordinary personal result didn’t mean that the party would make him mayor in Aas’s place. Kõlvart ran in Tallinn’s Lasnamäe voting district, where before him former Tallinn mayor and long-time party chairman Edgar Savisaar regularly got very good results.

In a speech on Sunday evening, Ratas said that the party would now concentrate on the 2019 Riigikogu elections. “2003 was the year when the Center Party last won the Riigikogu elections. In 2019 16 years will have passed since then. Today’s result means that we’ll continue the work to win the 2019 Riigikogu elections,” Ratas said.

In Tallinn the Center Party won 44.4 percent of all votes, the Reform Party 20.5 percent, the Social Democrats 11 percent, the Estonian Conservative People’s Party 7 percent, IRL 6.6 percent.

Center loses six mandates

Translated into mandates on the city council, this means the Center Party lost six mandates and are now at 40. The Reform Party doubled their mandates and now have 18 instead of 2013’s nine.

The Social Democrats at nine mandates did one mandate better than in 2013, while IRL crashed from 16 mandates after the last elections to just five. EKRE entered the city council with six mandates.

Of the election coalitions in Tallinn, only a single candidate was elected, and with a personal mandate: Edgar Savisaar. His coalition, the combined list of Active Tallinn and Edgar Savisaar’s Election Coalition, crashed in the elections and remained below the 5-percent threshold.

The Estonian Greens, at times ahead of IRL in the polls in the months leading up to the election, also remained below the 5-percent election threshold at 2.4 percent of the vote.

Turnout in Tallinn was 53.3 percent. With the Center Party’s absolute majority on the council, Tallinn’s next mayor is most likely going to be Taavi Aas (Center).