Estonia Elects 1st Female President

Estonia has voted for its first female president, ending a month-long political stalemate. Kersti Kaljulaid, 46, was confirmed in an 81-0 vote in Estonia’s 101-seat parliament on Monday after emerging last week as a surprise candidate following unsuccessful bids by four other contenders, DPA reported. She will be the country’s fifth president since 1991, when the three Baltic nations— Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—became independent during the collapse of the Soviet Union. On Monday, she promised to be president for all Estonians and regularly discuss issues with the ethnic Russian minority in the nation of 1.3 million people. She will succeed Toomas Hendrik Ilves, an outspoken critic of Russia who steps down next week after two five-year terms as president.   Kaljulaid, who has a business degree and is a trained biologist specializing in genetics, describes herself as economically conservative but liberal on social issues. Since the late 1990s, she has worked as an investment banker, run a power station, worked as a government economic policy adviser and spent the past 12 years as an EU auditor.