The first marriage equality in the Baltics
Estonia breaks a taboo in 2023: it becomes the first post-Soviet country to open marriage to everyone.
On 20 June 2023, the Estonian parliament made history: the Riigikogu voted by 55 to 34 to introduce marriage equality, the first Baltic and the first post-Soviet country in the world to do so. The Family Law Act was amended accordingly: instead of "a man and a woman", it now read "two adults". The law came into force on 1 January 2024.
The road there was anything but straight. Estonia had already introduced registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 2014, but for years the law remained an empty shell: conservative coalition partners systematically blocked the necessary implementing legislation, so that hardly any couples made use of it. Only after Prime Minister Kaja Kallas's election victory in March 2023 did the political situation change fundamentally. Her new three-party coalition of the Reform Party, Eesti 200 and the Social Democrats had made marriage equality a shared goal.
Yet even in spring 2023, victory was by no means certain. The far-right EKRE party tried to block the vote with hundreds of amendments and endless speeches. In response, the government tied the bill to a vote of confidence, which automatically swept away all the delaying tactics. Kallas won both the vote on marriage equality and the no-confidence motion.
After the vote, Kallas declared that she was "proud of Estonia". The lesbian teacher Annely Lepamaa summed up the feelings of many queer Estonians in an interview with Reuters: "Until now, I have had to fight for everything. I had to go to court to be allowed to adopt my own children." At the same time, a survey showed that social acceptance had grown: 53 per cent of the population supported marriage equality in 2023, compared with only 34 per cent ten years earlier.
The vote sent a signal to the whole region: Latvia and Lithuania, the other two Baltic states, were at that time still struggling with blocked partnership laws. That a former Soviet country, of all places, took this step while Russia was tightening its "anti-propaganda laws" made the contrast all the starker.