Kaja Kallas has officially stepped down from her role as Estonia’s Prime Minister to become the foreign policy chief of the European Union later this year.
Kallas — the Baltic nation’s first female prime minister — handed in her formal resignation to President Alar Karis on Monday (15 July), during a brief meeting at the Presidential Palace in the country’s capital of Tallinn.
Under Kallas, 47, Estonia has been one of Europe’s most vocal backers of Ukraine following the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.
She has been at the helm of the nation, with a population of 1.3 million, for three and a half years.
In a tribute to the politician, Alar Karis summed up her tenure saying, “it has been a time full of crises, the milestones (such as) the coronavirus, the economic recession and the war in Europe, when Russia destroyed our previous security picture with its aggression in Ukraine”.
Her last main duty was to represent Estonia at a NATO summit in Washington DC last week.
In her new role, Kallas will replace Josep Borrell of Spain, who has served as the EU foreign policy chief since 2019.
In Estonia, her decision to leave automatically triggered the resignation of Kallas’ three-party Cabinet, made up of her centre-right Reform Party, the Social Democratic Party and the liberal Estonia 200 party.
The coalition will continue as a caretaker government until the new Cabinet has been sworn in at the end of July or in early August.
On 29 June, the Reform Party announced that it had chosen party veteran and Climate Minister Kristen Michal as the candidate to replace Kallas as the prime minister.
Michal’s nomination will have to be approved by Karis and the 101-seat parliament – known as the Riigikogu – where the coalition currently holds a comfortable majority.
He has been serving as the minister for climate affairs since April 2023.
The 49-year-old former economics and justice minister has been active in the Reform Party, Estonia’s key political establishment, since the late 1990s.
