Pevkur pointed to the criticism of the budget bill by several economists and analysts, Bank of Estonia’s president Ardo Hansson among them. In a time where both salaries and the gross domestic product were growing, the budget needed to aim at a moderate surplus, not a deficit, Pevkur said.

Tax revenue had been calculated too optimistically, he went on, which meant that the actual deficit might eventually “much bigger than planned”. Pevkur also said that the budget didn’t take the “cyclical nature of the economy” into account, although he didn’t go into any more detail.

His party could only endorse the budget once it had been brought into structural balance. Using part of the country’s reserves, as the government was planning to do it, was not acceptable.