Vallo Olle: Restricting the electorate for municipal councils
Senior Adviser to the Chancellor of Justice, Vallo Olle, writes in the latest issue of Juridica about restrictions on voting rights in local elections.
In recent years, several draft laws were introduced to limit the electorate for municipal council elections. Their sponsors believed that such a restriction of a fundamental right could be imposed without amending the Constitution. Some proposals aimed to deprive Russian and Belarusian citizens of the right to vote; others extended this to stateless persons. Some drafts preserved voting rights for citizens of Estonia and other EU Member States, and in some cases also for citizens of NATO countries. Ultimately, a different decision was made: on 26 March 2025, the electorate was limited by amending the Constitution.
In public debate, the amendment has been justified on the grounds of ensuring security, as well as on moral grounds, arguing that citizens of aggressor states should not exercise any political rights in Estonia. Conversely, it has been suggested that this may constitute a reshaping of the electorate in a way that benefits certain political parties.
The key legal question has been whether such a change could have been made by ordinary legislation—i.e., via the Local Government Council Election Act—without amending the Constitution. In this article, the author seeks to demonstrate that the Constitutional Assembly deliberately decided that all permanent residents should have voting rights in municipal council elections. Article 156(2) of the Constitution was drafted by the Constitutional Assembly so that citizenship-based discrimination cannot be introduced through electoral law. Now that the electorate has been restricted by constitutional amendment, the question remains how the change aligns with the letter and spirit of the Constitution.