Voting stations opened yesterday in Estonia's first parliamentary election since joining the EU, with last-minute polls predicting the governing coalition would stay in power.
Prime Minister Andrus Ansip's center-right Reform Party and the left-leaning Center Party, led by political veteran Edgar Savisaar, have topped most opinion surveys in the run-up to yesterday's vote.
Analysts said the main question was which of the two would be the next prime minister of the Baltic country of 1.3 million, and whether they would need another coalition partner to form a government. They currently govern with the help of the small agrarian Estonian People's Union.
Ansip and Savisaar, Estonia's first prime minister after regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have maintained a pragmatic political alliance for two years despite political differences.
Ansip favors maintaining Estonia's flat-tax system and market friendly policies that economists say have helped the high-tech Baltic country achieve impressive growth rates. Worries of an overheating economy have emerged, however, after Estonia posted a record 11.5 percent growth rate last year.
Savisaar, whose party draws support from Estonia's Russian-speaking minority, favors switching to a progressive tax system. He also calls for a more generous welfare system to help narrow the gap between rich and poor.
The Center Party topped a poll of 400 people released on Friday by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates. Center had 32 percent in the survey, and the Reform Party had 23 percent. The main opposition party, the center-right IRL union, had 10 percent support in the survey, which had a margin error of 4.9 percentage points.
Savisaar said he would be flexible in coalition talks.
"I believe no politician is at this point so stupid as to rule out a coalition with some other party after the election," he said.
Estonia -- a member of both the EU and NATO since 2004 and a key hub for online telephony company Skype -- is one of Europe's most advanced when it comes to Internet technology. But the country grapples with some of the 27-nation EU's worst health statistics, including high rates of HIV infections, alcoholism, and traffic-related deaths.
Rampant inflation has forced the government to postpone plans to adopt the EU's common currency while a westward flow of skilled workers has led to a problematic labor shortage. Companies ranging from shipyards to software makers such as eBay-owned telephony company Skype have had to import workers from countries like Ukraine and India.
The run-up to the election was overshadowed by a dispute over a Soviet monument in Tallinn that has exposed divisions between ethnic Estonians and the country's Russian-speaking minority, which makes up about one-third of the the nation's population.
Ansip has called for removing the Bronze Soldier monument and war grave, which Russians see as tribute to the Red Army's victory over Nazi Germany, but which many Estonians consider a painful reminder of five decades of Soviet oppression.
"Nobody is talking here in Estonia about destroying this monument," Ansip said on Thursday. "We would like to relocate this monument to a cemetery -- that's all."
The election was the world's first parliamentary ballot to allow Internet voting. Some 30,000 people already cast their votes online in a three-day period that ended on Wednesday, election officials said.
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