Kaja Kallas, the plain-talking Estonian tipped to be the EU’s top diplomat
LIKE A KENNEDY in America, Kaja Kallas has carried both the privilege and the burden of her family name. Her father, Siim Kallas, an economist, was the first head of independent Estonia’s central bank, prime minister from 2002 to 2003 and the country’s European Commissioner from 2004 to 2014. (He is the only person to have been a member both of the European Commission and the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s legislature, in which he served briefly before the country’s collapse in 1991.) For years, even after becoming leader of the Reform Party her father had founded, Ms Kallas struggled to live up to his legacy. Many Estonians thought her honest and intelligent, but too nice to lead the country.
Once she became prime minister in 2021, that changed. Her pleas that more sceptical European leaders should believe American warnings that Vladimir Putin was planning to invade Ukraine proved correct. Her tiny country (population 1.3m) became proportionally one of Ukraine’s biggest donors; after she ordered the dismantling of Soviet war memorials Russia issued a warrant for her arrest. International journalists began referring to her as an “iron lady”.
Ms Kallas is now tipped to become the next head of the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic arm. The job is the bloc’s equivalent of a foreign minister, and is considered one of its top four posts. Some leaders now worry not that Ms Kallas is too nice, but that she is too tough—that she will focus too much on the conflict with Russia, to the detriment of Europe’s relations with the rest of the world.
The “iron lady” moniker sits oddly on Ms Kallas. In person she seems guileless and self-effacing. She once confessed to Adam Grant, a psychology podcaster, that she had suffered from imposter syndrome. In an interview with The Economist in January 2022 she expressed baffled irritation at being criticised for her fashion choices rather than her policies. Whereas some leaders dominate interviews, Ms Kallas is empathetic and reflective. In an earlier interview with The Economist, during an election campaign in 2019, a question about why Estonia was less corrupt than Moldova prompted her to pause, for several seconds, before offering a sophisticated thesis about privatisation in the 1990s.
She is also quick to link the political and the personal. She often explains her mistrust of Russia by describing her family’s experiences. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were among tens of thousands of Estonians deported to Siberia when the Soviet Union conquered the country in 1940. (Her great-grandfather was a renowned lawyer and police chief; the Soviets were trying to exterminate the country’s independent elite.) As with many members of the intelligentsia, her family’s adaptation to communism was pragmatic: her father made it to the Supreme Soviet, but was also one of the earliest advocates of Estonian self-government in the late 1980s.
Ms Kallas originally wanted nothing to do with politics. She spent a decade as a corporate lawyer specialising in European antitrust law. She became an MP in 2011 and then a member of the European Parliament until 2018. The Reform Party chose her to lead it in the 2019 general election and finished first, but was shut out of power by an alliance of the far-right populist EKRE party, the centre-right Isamaa party and the Centre Party, a mainly urban outfit that draws most of the votes of the Russian-speaking minority. When that coalition collapsed in 2021 she formed a government with the Centre Party.
In her early campaigns Ms Kallas seemed a little hesitant. As prime minister, she found her voice. In domestic policy, she continued her party’s brand of competent technocratic management and responsible budgeting, which shaped Estonia’s reputation as a digital pioneer in the 2010s. Russia’s invasion in February 2022 was a disaster for Ukraine and Europe, but it boosted Ms Kallas’s international stature. Her implied I-told-you-so to leaders pleased Estonians and other eastern Europeans who had felt condescended to by the West. She became the champion of a region that saw itself not just as catching up with western Europe, but ahead of it in understanding the violent realities of a multipolar world.
In the election of March 2023 Ms Kallas trounced the populists. But months later Estonia’s public broadcaster revealed that her husband was a major shareholder in a beverage label-printing company that had continued (legally) to do business in Russia. There are no serious accusations that she was aware of this, but the scandal has tarnished her image. She has pressed ahead with her liberal agenda, passing legislation to allow gay marriage (unpopular in socially conservative Estonia) and, perhaps even more controversially, a registration tax on cars. With the Reform party polling below 20% it may be a good moment for her to make a change.
In many ways Ms Kallas seems perfectly suited to a top job in Brussels. She is a vehement defender of liberalism and of Europe. She is a bit of a nerd, peppering conversations with references to academic and political texts. (She warns Westerners against trusting Russian diplomats by reciting from memory the four aggressive negotiating principles laid down by Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister in the 1980s.) She is an institutionalist who is comfortable with complexity: she seems genuinely furious about populist politicians, like those in EKRE, who promise solutions that will only worsen problems in the long run.
Yet the job of EEAS chief can be a frustrating one. Divisions between EU members on many issues often means there is no European consensus to represent. Ms Kallas is not always terribly diplomatic. Last November she had to apologise to teachers after telling them that if they wanted higher salaries they should support her car tax to raise revenues. She is more candid than most politicians. In one interview, she quoted Bill Clinton saying that the key to winning in politics is “hunger for success”. Asked whether she had that hunger, she replied: “I guess so.” ■
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