Soc dems first to see President

Photo: Toomas Tatar / Postimees

This weekend, Reform Party and Social Democratic Party held talks to find common grounds. No agreement, as yet.

Today, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves starts consultations with parliamentary parties, in run-up to creation of new coalition government. The four meetings take place from Monday to Wednesday.

At 11 am, today, representatives of soc dems (SDE) arrive at the presidential castle in Kadriorg, to be followed by IRL at 3 pm, said the President’s PR-adviser Toomas Sildam.

Tomorrow at 2.30 pm, Centre Party representatives will show up. The consultations end the day after tomorrow, President Ilves hosting Reform Party at 11 am. 

The timetable means that before Wednesday, nomination of the creator of new coalition is definitely not to be expected from the President. For that, Mr Ilves indeed has even more time on his hands – counting from the stepping down of the Prime Minister, the time-limit is 14 days i.e. till the start of next week.

The party delegations headed to the President are composed of three members, including chairman of the Riigikogu faction and two other politicians.

By the talks, Mr Ilves hopes to find out what the coalition led by the next prime minister might look like, and how the parliamentary parties view domestic, foreign and security policy issues important for Estonia.

Yesterday, it still looked the likeliest that the new coalition would happen between Reform Party and SDE. Even with only two days’ worth of negotiations held between the «unofficial» delegations, contacts to probe the atmosphere between the leading governmental party and soc dems have been underway for the two last weeks.

Should squirrels and soc dems still fail to reach a deal, Reform Party will be facing a moment more problematic – having discarded Centre Party from the very start, they should go back to IRL, whose leaders by now are sorely disappointed in the behaviour of squirrels, who launched coalition talks with soc dems and not with them.

Today, soc dems and Reform Party enter the third day of power talks. After yesterday’s official round of discussions, the Reformers’ proposed prime minister candidate Siim Kallas claimed the parties had edged nearer to common grounds, but a hundred percent assurance of coalition wasn’t there yet.

As expected, he affirmed money to be the toughest topic. «Today, we reached agreement in a couple of points, but not in numbers,» said Mr Kallas.

Mr Kallas mentioned the need to sustain structural budget balance, but also the need to raise salaries of people paid from state budget. «In such issues we did agree, but the numbers are not coming together yet,» said Mr Kallas.

The most important precondition for soc dems to enter government is significant raise of child benefit, which, considering the tensions of the budget, is a complicated task.

SDE chairman Sven Mikser told BNS after the two parties finished talking, yesterday, that they had mainly discussed culture and education policy; today – on Monday – discussions will touch topics related to environment, agriculture and energy.