Social Dems: Russian Votes Needed for 2015 Election Win

The chairman of the opposition Social Democratic Party, Sven Mikser, has said that courting the Russian minority vote would be the key to gaining power in the next round of parliamentary elections.

“Our goal is to win the parliamentary elections in 2015,” Mikser told Delfi. “It’s clear that in order to do that, it’s necessary to get additional support from both Estonian-speaking and Russian-speaking voters. If we are able to garner every third vote for the Social Dems from Estonian speakers and every third from Russian speakers, then we can consider ourselves to have made a step forward and achieved our goal,” he said.

Though traditionally the opposition Centre Party has enjoyed a near monopoly on political support by the nation’s ethnic Russian minority, the Social Democrats have lately been making obvious moves to court that portion of the electorate. Earlier this month they entered into merger negotiations with the Russian Party in Estonia, a small, marginal party focusing on minority issues.

This autumn, polls showed that popular support for the Social Democratic Party had increased, allowing it to edge out the Centre Party as the second most popular in the nation.

http://news.err.ee/politics/44e10b8b-1415-4989-aab1-ebeb18e5189d