42 The Times Magazine
aja Kallas pings into view on a
morning call from Tallinn and
is kind enough to wave aside my
failure to get our Teams call to
work earlier. I am painfully aware
that one of the things the new
leader of the most northern Baltic
state is best known for is her
enthusiastic support of digital
innovation. “We’re all still getting
used to this, aren’t we?” she says soothingly.
Estonia’s first female prime minister was
sworn in at the end of January. Her Reform
Party heads a coalition that she says is a “new
start for a better year”, in a country that sits
on the fault line between the former Soviet
Union and the West.
She looks like a blonde version of Birgitte
Nyborg in the Danish TV drama Borgen
- the same calm, firm pleasantness and
a sliver of steel lurking not far below her
affability. Kallas joins a political sexual
revolution in the Nordic and Baltic states.
Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania and
Iceland all have women at the helm. A Swedish
friend jokes they will “soon need special
measures for better male representation”
- Sweden and Latvia being the only countries
in the region where men still run the show.
“I am very proud to be elected as a female
leader in 2021 and that my country feels fine
with that. It’s not about my gender; it’s just
progress,” Kallas laughs. “But I don’t think it
is surprising. Expectations have changed. It is
about who is right for the job at a particular
time and their competence, not their gender.”
The 43-year-old lawyer is a political
thoroughbred. Her father, Siim Kallas, was
one of the reformists who oversaw Estonia’s
transition from communism to independence
in 1991. Her grandfather, Eduard Alver, was
one of the founders of the Republic of Estonia
in 1918, and the first chief of the Estonian
police. I wonder how she feels about being
the first daughter of the dynasty to take the
reins. A slight bristle. “I learnt about Estonian
politics around the kitchen table because
of my father. I didn’t just go into the family
business for the sake of it. We had doctors
and politicians and financial consultants – you
could say I rebelled and became a lawyer.”
Her own views are economically centrist
and vehemently pro-EU (she started her ascent
as a member of the European Parliament).
“My government will be very pro-European,”
she says. She wants “a very clear change
in policies, especially on climate change”.
To curb emissions, she has signed up to a
policy to ditch oil shale gas.
Estonia is a country with a relatively large
rural population where social conservatism and
technological progress coexist. It outperforms
major European economies, including the UK,
in influential global education tests and is
the originator of innovative “digital passports”
to ease currency transactions and attract
high-tech businesses. At the same time it’s
a country with a persistent rump of ethno-
nationalism. Kallas can dish out a solid
tongue-lashing, telling opponents who say
she represents educated, urban Estonia, “Can’t
you have this monologue in front of a mirror?
You were in government for two years and did
nothing for places and people far from Tallinn.”
Easy, of course, to sound assured when the
coalition-building that is common in Nordic
power-broking has ended in your favour.
The mother of three children – her second
husband is a venture capitalist and they
have a “blended” family with her son from
an earlier marriage to another politician, and
his two offspring – is often pictured on the
covers of glossy magazines in her homeland
wearing bright bodycon dresses and high
heels. She tends to reject the sombre suits
of, say, Kamala Harris (who objected to a US
Vogue cover shoot on the grounds that too
casual clothing was demeaning to her new
office) or the boxy jackets of Angela Merkel.
“Everyone pays attention to my clothes,”
Kallas sighs. “When I was in the European
Parliament, I wrote a blog about the digital
single market, climate change, big issues, and
if someone asked me about my dresses, I
wondered why they were focusing on what
I wear. I would sometimes say, let’s talk about
the serious things on my blog – and then we
can talk about fashion.” At one point during
the election campaign, two older male
colleagues commanded she change her style to
trousers and shorter hair and lower her voice.
She duly ignored their advice. “It sounded like,
‘Be more masculine.’ I felt there was nothing
wrong with me; I’m just a different gender.”
Today she’s wearing a fashionable colour-
blocked blue and black dress. She’s often to
be seen on her picture-perfect Instagram
account wearing gorgeous outfits and playing
with her dog. Isn’t it a bit late to be worrying
about being judged on appearance? “Well,
OK, people can be interested,” she concedes.
“But I won’t be judged on that in the end.”
(All of which is true, but many of the
stateswomen I have encountered have rocked a
particular style to their advantage. Encountering
Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and
again after her attempt at the presidency had
backfired, she was dressed on both occasions
in bright blue and purple fine woollen suits. No
question of who the “first female” in the room
was in this plumage. I also suspect she dressed
up especially for David Miliband, for whom
she had a soft spot – when we went to see her
in her office in the austere Harry S Truman
Building during her full pomp as secretary
of state, she was impeccably made-up and
wearing the largest pair of diamond cluster
earrings I have seen outside a state banquet.)
Qualified, like Clinton and Harris, as a
lawyer, Kallas joined a Finnish firm dealing in
corporate law, but has said that by her mid-
thirties she felt she was “playing too much
golf” and ready for a shake-up – seeking a seat
in the European Parliament, making her name
as an advocate for digital integration. She’s a
fan of Angela Merkel, she tells me, “because
she has held it together for so long and
I admire her serenity and ability to deal with
pressure. There is a lot to learn from her.”
Can she really be happy with the EU’s
lamentably sluggish Covid vaccination
programme, when even Eurocrats are holding
up their hands and admitting to failures? She’s
keeping the EU faith, at least publicly. “Without
a joint approach... a small country like ours
can’t really get good deals that pharmaceutical
companies have with a big country. Once
vaccines do arrive at scale, Estonia’s 1.3 million
population can be vaccinated quickly.”
The most testing question facing her
is interwoven with Estonia’s long years of
Communist domination following the forcible
1940 annexation of the three Baltic states
by Stalin. For Kallas, it’s personal. Her family
was targeted in mass deportations of Estonians
and in 2015 she tweeted, poignantly, “Today,
66 years ago, my family (Mother being just
6 months old) was deported to Siberia by the
Soviet regime. We must not forget.”
In the wake of the poisoning and
imprisonment of the Kremlin critic Alexei
Navalny, and the hounding of activists
K
Kaja Kallas
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