A big man from a very, very small country

Top political talent is thin on the ground in the post-Communist world.

The Czech President Václav Klaus is too abrasive to represent more than his own super-sized brain. Poland (the defence ministry aside) is a political wasteland. The less said about ex-Yugoslavia the better. In the Baltic states, Lithuania’s President Valdas Adamkus is doddery and Latvia’s Vaira Vike-Freiberga insufferably queenly.

All the more reason, therefore, to hope that Estonia’s electoral college on 23 September will choose Toomas Hendrik Ilves as president over the incumbent Arnold Rüütel. True, Rüütel is not as bad as his critics say. Although he’s waffly, indecisive and burdened with a political career rooted in the occupation regime, as the last leader of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic he played an important role in easing the country’s path to regained independence. For Estonians whose best years were spent in the Soviet era, he is a symbol of comfort and continuity.

But nobody outside Estonia has heard of him. His only foreign language is Russian and in 20 years covering the Baltic states, I can’t recall him saying anything interesting or memorable.

Ilves, by contrast, is sometimes all too memorable. Although a kind and polite man in private, he comes across all too often as acerbic and arrogant. Born of émigré parents, his flamboyant bow ties and punchy language sit oddly in Estonia’s low-key political culture.

Never mind. Estonia’s first post-occupation president, the mercurial and charismatic Lennart Meri, was not a typical Estonian either. And as in the early 1990s, both Estonia and post-communist Europe need someone to talk to the outside world vividly and convincingly on the central questions of our time. It may be overstatement (though I don’t think so) to say the new Cold War has already started, but no one can doubt that the European Union is failing miserably in dealing with its eastern fringe and resurgent Russia.

And here Ilves, a former foreign minister and now vice-chair of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, is a bravura performer. Few European politicians - from any country - have the knack of understanding the way the world looks from both Brussels and Washington, DC. Ilves does. As an intellectual heavyweight, he can speak up for his pint-sized country. It may be small, but both its experience of reform and modernisation, and the dangers facing it, are of world importance.

Oddly, if the election were by a popular vote, Ilves would win easily. But Estonia’s half-baked constitution chooses the president first by a vote in parliament, and then - if no candidate wins a two-thirds majority - the decision goes to a collection of local-government worthies.

Here Rüütel is on strong ground. Even in a country with Estonia’s 1 million-odd population, there are deep divisions between winners and losers from the last 15 years. The multi-lingual go-getting world of Tallinn wants more change; the countryside and much of local government yearns for stability and predictability.

Ilves has done a lot to shed his metropolitan (and cosmopolitan) tinge. He has developed a taste for manual labour at a farmhouse he is restoring. His Estonian has lost the transatlantic émigré twang that some locals found unsettling in the early 1990s.

I hope that’s enough. If Estonia was just an up-and-coming region of Finland, then perhaps Rüütel would be the right candidate to reassure poor and marginalised voters that their interests wouldn’t be forgotten. But Estonians have a unique chance to elect someone who will represent not just their country’s interests, but those of all the former captive nations. I hope they take it.

• Edward Lucas is central and east European correspondent for The Economist.

Top political talent is thin on the ground in the post-Communist world.