IFES Election Guide - Country Profile: Estonia

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Parliamentary
March 2015

Estonia
Republic of Estonia
Region: Europe

Description of government structure:

Chief of State: President Toomas Hendrik ILVES
Head of Government: Prime Minister Andrus ANSIP
Assembly: Estonia has a unicameral Parliament (Riigikogu) with 101 seats.

Description of electoral system:

The President is elected by parliament to serve a 5-year term. *
The Prime Minister is nominated by the president with the approval of the parliament.
In the Parliament (Riigikogu) 101 members are elected through an open-list proportional representation system to serve 4-year terms.***

* A candidate must obtain two-thirds (68) of the votes in the parliament to be elected. If this does not happen after two rounds of voting, a third is held the same day between the top two candidates in the previous round. If this round fails to elect a president, an electoral assembly, comprising parliament and members of local councils, elects the president.

*** There are 12 multi-member constituencies with district magnitude ranging from 6 to 13 seats. There is a 5% threshold. Seats are allocated in three rounds. In the first round, seats are awarded to candidates who garner the same or more votes than the simple quota in their electoral districts. In the second round, seats are allocated in a traditional PR method. That is, party lists are awarded seats based on their share of the vote in the district, and candidates within the list receive seats in the order of how many preferential votes they received. In the third round of counting, all remaining mandates are distributed between the national candidate lists with at least 5% of the national vote.