The new EU High Representative Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s first female Prime Minister, was born in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1977.. Her great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was one of the founders of Estonia and had commanded the Kaitseliit, the Estonian Defence League, a volunteer militia dedicated to defending the institutions and territory of the small nation, squeezed between the Gulf of Finland, Latvia and Russia. Her father, Siim Kallas, was prime minister between 2002 and 2003 and subsequently a three-time European Commissioner. Her mother Kirsti, when she was six months old, was deported together with her mother and grandmother (Kaja’s grandmother and great-grandmother, respectively) to Siberia in 1941, only to return home ten years later.
Estonia has a troubled history: independent since 1920, it was occupied by the Red Army in 1940, after the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact of August 1939, then it was ‘liberated’ by the Nazis and finally reoccupied by the USSR in 1944.” I am part of the lucky generation – Kallas told the New Statesman – we lived in a prison, without freedom, without the possibility of choosing, without anything. In 1991, when I was a little girl, we regained our independence and our freedom.”
The opposite of what happened to her grandparents, who in independent Estonia “had everything” and lost everything when the Soviet Union occupied the country in 1940. Kaja Kallas graduated from Tartu Law School and has an MBA from the Estonian Business School; she became a lawyer in 2002. In 2010 she joined the Eesti Reformierakond, Estonian Reform Party, founded by her father, a liberal formation, known as the ‘squirrel party’ because of its logo. From 2014 to 2018 she was a member of the European Parliament, an experience to which she dedicated a book. In 2021 she became prime minister, leading a coalition government with the Centre Party (Eesti Keskerakond).
In January 2022, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he denounced the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as a “geopolitical” project and stressed that the EU’s dependence on Russian gas was a major political problem. In June 2022, she sent home all centrist ministers, because they had voted with the opposition against a law making Estonian language teaching compulsory for pre-school children, to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and Isamaa, the Motherland Party. In 2023, she won the elections, increasing her party’s seats in the Riigikogu, the Estonian Parliament. Married to Arvo Hallik, in addition to her native Estonian, she speaks fluent English, French, Russian and Finnish.
