Mayor for how much longer?

  • 2001-05-17
  • TBT staff/BNS
TALLINN - Tallinn Mayor Juri Mois is keeping his job by decision of the Pro Patria Union party, but unsatisfied coalition partners are plotting a no-confidence motion anyway.

In keeping with its earlier promises, the Reform Party decided to initiate a vote of no confidence against Tallinn Mayor Juri Mois of the Pro Patria Union on May 14. As usual, the vote takes place on a Thursday (May 17) session of the City Council.

Mois told reporters on May 12, right after the general meeting of Pro Patria Union's Tallinn division, that his next step will be to try to find a common language with coalition partners again.

Mois said he was sure that the Reform Party and the Moderates wouldn't initiate a censure motion against him like they had previously threatened to.

"The Reform Party and the Moderates can well understand that their votes are not enough to carry a motion of no confidence in myself. To threaten with a censure motion is simply their tactical move to win a better position," the mayor said.

The Reform Party and the Moderates control 14 of the City Council's 64 seats.

Hagi Sein, chairman of the Moderates' faction in the Tallinn City Council, stated that if Mois continued in his post then the coalition would certainly split.

"The Moderates and the Reform Party have said that they want the present coalition to carry on but see no chance for it if Juri Mois continues as mayor," Sein said.

At the May 12 general meeting of the Tallinn chapter, 109 members of the party gave their votes in Mois' favor while 81 voted for his resignation.

In remarks published in the Postimees daily on May 12, Mois said there were interest groups who wished to get rid of him.

He suggested that one such group was the nationalist wing within the Pro Patria Union demanding that the monument for Soviet troops who recaptured Tallinn in 1944 be removed from its present central location.

Four ministers from the Pro Patria Union party put their weight behind a recommendation of the party's MPs for Tallinn Mayor Juri Mois to step down on May 11.

While Cabinet members - Transport and Communications Minister Toivo Jurgenson, Defense Minister Juri Luik, Education Minister Tonis Lukas and Interior Minister Tarmo Loodus - didn't put their signatures under the letter of Pro Patria's MPs, they declared their support for the recommendation set out in it.

"Luik, Loodus, Jurgenson and Lukas underscored that while as members of the government they cannot interfere with local government politics, that as members of the Pro Patria Union and politicians they support the principles laid out in the communication by members of the Pro Patria Union faction of the Parliament to Juri Mois," said a spokesperson of Pro Patria Union.

Mois said he didn't intend to heed the recommendation of the MPs and would rather wait for the general meeting of the party's Tallinn chapter, which he successfully passed.