Estonian elections, March 6

[ag]

Well, judging by the names, of the 26 Center Party MPs, may be, 9 or 10 are "russophones" (includes all sort of the post-Soviets: Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, or Tartars). Interestingly enough, there seems to be more of them at the top of the list. Only 1 out of 33 Reform party MPs seems to be "russophone", as, may be are two MP's from Pro-Patria/Res Publica and 2 Social Democrats (in the latter case, one of the two is almost certainly only a Russian on his maternal side, but an Estonian on the Paternal side - or else, he is from the weirdish Estonian-Orthodox ethnic minority: Russian last name, Estonian first name). This is, almost certainly an overestimate: I interpreted every dubious name as "russophone". The rest are overwhelmingly Estonian, though there are may be a couple of Germans and/or Letts hiding in the "Estonian" part of the list - some of the Germans would be prety estonianized, anyway.

[ag]

BTW, there was a Russian list, it got almost no votes though.

Pity the Greenies didn't make it: at the top of their list was Alexei Lotman, who, I believe, is the son of Yuri Lotman, one of the most important Russian intellectuals (Tartu University based) from the past century. The rest of that list was reliably Estonian.

[ag]

I am not sure it is still true that MOST Russians have no citizenship. A lot of them either left (not necessarily for Russia, but also for the rest of the EU) or got naturalized. As of the 2000 census 170 thousand residents of Estonia were without any citizenship, but the 2010 official estimate is only about 102 thousand. About the same number of people, probably, have Russian citizenship (in fact, perhaps a bit less: the estimate is around 95 thousand). If we take the current "russophone" population of Estonia to be a bit over 400 thousand (in all these numbers I am cheating and following Russian wikipedia, so they might be off - I don't have time to properly search now), it would seem that a little bit over a half the "Russians" still left in Estonia are Estonian citizens.  Non-citizens in Estonia vote in municipal elections (they are, probably, still a majority in some towns), but not in the national elections. With the number of naturalizations now down to smthg like 2000 a year, it will take forever for the problem to disappear, but it is not at all as bad as it was right after independence.

[ag]

Since something like 40% of the population of Estonia is Russian, is there a party that specificaly defends the rights of the Russian minority?

A bit less than 40% by now. A lot of them have moved out. It would, probably, be about 400 thousand "russophones" out of 1.3 mln. Of these, may be, half are citizens.

[ag]

It pretty accurately reflects Estonian political preferences. Anything to the left of New Labor would be viewed as a foreign occupation force in that country.