The President and Parliament share a common goal – to ensure that our laws are sound and clear as a whole, and correct down to the smallest detail

Members of the Riigikogu,

Guests,

I am here today to open the Autumn Session of the Riigikogu for the last time.

It has been three and half years since I stood before you to wish the newly elected Riigikogu all the success. You have heard me repeat year after year how important was the role of the parliament and the decisions you needed to make.

I believe it bears repeating because our daily lives and trivial conflicts often stop us from seeing the understated presence held by the highest chamber in a free country.

However, today I would prefer to sum up what I have come to realise about the relations of the President of the Republic and the Riigikogu during my office. My term of office has been mostly spent in the company of the 15th Riigikogu.

I am sure you have personal opinions on whether the division of roles between the President, the parliament, and the government has been correct over the recent years. I have also experienced how general principles, which are often repeated and listed as ideals, actually work in practice.

First of all-I have drawn the conclusion that if the President is doing their job, they can be sure to displease the members of the Riigikogu. I know this feeling from my work as the Auditor General, and it is impossible to avoid.

Members of the opposition expect the President not to proclaim an Act that has been passed after heated debates. But a very important principle is that the parliamentary majority makes most of the national level decisions in a parliamentary democracy.

I have seen that arguments can be found to declare almost any Act to be in conflict with the Constitution and in need of being vetoed. And yet, if we interpret the Constitution very broadly, all issues of national governance would eventually end up being decided by the court. In that case, the elections would lose much of their point.

When the President rejects an Act-which I have had to do more often than my most recent predecessors-they can be fairly sure that the members of the coalition would think that they were making a big mistake. A veto still seems to be taken as a reproach by members of the Riigikogu. I have not always seen the situation like that because, after all, the President and the parliament have the same goal-to make sure that our legislation is universally sound and clear, as well as correct down to the last detail.

Everyone, of course, generally agrees to this goal, but in practice this can be interpreted as nitpicking and finding pretexts to shelve an Act because of some minor detail.

However, I do not think that the President can avoid the question whether the Riigikogu has explained its requirements to people clearly enough so that the law can be respected without waiting for an interpretation by an official or even a punishment to bring final clarity.

Since the President must respect the political choices of the parliament, their main task is to check that the goal has been translated into clear Acts that actually help to achieve it.

The second lesson is that if the goal is very important, it tends to overshadow everything else.

One example of this is the Act on the language requirement in the Defence Forces. When I vetoed this Act, I was surprised to find myself reaffirming again and again that I was not against setting a language requirement.

Even if I were, as a President I would still have had to respect the opinion of the parliamentary majority that the language requirement was necessary. Rather, the question was how such a requirement was actually to be implemented in real life. The National Defence Committee dedicated much more attention to this topic later, and the Riigikogu eventually passed a very thoroughly considered Act.

I see this as an example of excellent cooperation between the President and the parliament, even though it involved a conflict. I do not mean to say that there should not have been this conflict or the misunderstandings. Rather, it is another proof that the President must often choose whether to prevent the displeasure of the MPs or to do their own job.

In fact it is a kind of a paradox that the parliament elects the President, whose most important tasks include slowing down, if not completely blocking, the work of the Riigikogu in certain cases. Especially from the point of view of the majority of the Riigikogu, the need for this kind of a system might appear doubtful.

I believe that this need exists. Not that I have concluded that the members of the Riigikogu are not doing their job well or that the President knows better than they do. Not at all. But someone has to look at the legislation from a slightly different angle that does not adhere to the usual political rivalries.

Not only the parliament but the society more broadly is concentrating primarily on practical goals, be it economic growth, price reduction, preservation of nature, ensuring security, or something else.

This is how it should be because at the end of the day we are interested in the results and not legal provisions. But if we have our sights on an important goal and we feel pressure to achieve this rapidly, everything else might seem secondary.

It is then that we might not properly consider whether the Act helps us to reach our goals or takes us in an entirely different direction.

Admittedly, there is generally also no consensus on what constitutes a sound and efficient Act, and in a parliamentary democracy such debates must also eventually be resolved in the parliament. At the same time, national interests reach beyond the political choices by the parliamentary majority.

At the opening session of the current Riigikogu, I said that the power of the majority must not start deepening the social divides. This is where the precarious balance point is hidden because the parliamentary majority must be able to decide despite everything, if we do not want important national decisions to remain blocked by disputes and disagreements.

We can talk about political priorities and practical tasks, but at the end of the day, the basis for everything, the foundation for the development of both the democracy and the state is a parliament that has a quorum.

I have been reproached for not protecting the majority right to vote during the parliamentary obstruction, and also that I did not speak out sufficiently in defence of the rights of the opposition.

These opposing objections apparently reflect my attempts to follow the principles that I mentioned in this Hall in April 2023.

The majority must have the right to make decisions; however, to justify these and make the society understand them, it is not enough that more members of the Riigikogu have voted in their favour than against.

The role of the opposition is not to block the decisions of the majority. Nevertheless, by exerting pressure, the opposition can ensure that the need for an Act has been determined, all alternatives have been considered, and counter-arguments have demonstrably been taken seriously.

So the core of the question does not lie in majority versus minority. It is inevitable that a minority opinion loses out in the parliament. I am sure that it is also inevitable that this causes tensions in the society from time to time. This tension is part and parcel of democracy and some of it is offloaded during elections.

And yet there is a different kind of tension, sometimes even deep disappointment caused by the impression that the MPs do not much care about the opinion of the citizens more generally. However erroneous this impression is, we cannot deny that it exists and that if it gains ground, it might start threatening the parliamentary system as a whole.

When such mistrust and disappointment surface, some people might expect the President to utter general statements about the importance of parliamentary democracy-in other words, to educate the people.

I have understood the role of the President differently. My priority has been to prevent mistrust in state leaders from deepening and to make sure that the people understand the decisions of the parliament and government at least from the point of view of the goals and reasoning, because we cannot expect everyone to like them anyway.

In my mind, this goal has given a practical content to the general opinion that is often expressed: the role of the President is to stand up for unity and national spirit in our daily reality, where the politics keep polarising the opinions.

Yes, it is often repeated but does this really only mean that the President should deliver uplifting speeches during national holidays and talk about us being one nation despite our disagreements during their tours of the country? Would this be enough when the society is becoming increasingly demanding, self-aware, and saturated with information?

I think that uplifting speeches are not enough if we want to preserve the feeling of national unity, which eventually is the basis for respecting the decisions made by the parliament that we personally do not agree with.

The third lesson is that if we work towards that kind of framework unity, this might not generate immediate unity, but might instead cause disputes.

The coalition tends to view it as political interference, and in a sense it is, because the President's task is not to simply observe politics as a bystander.

I would like to repeat that if the President is doing their job, they can be sure to displease the members of the Riigikogu.

I suppose this is how it should be-this is how our system of separated powers has been built and it has generally worked. The main thing is to make sure that our country would gain from all this.

I wish you all the success.