Socialistische europarlementariër gekozen tot president van Estland (en)

Socialist MEP Toomas Hendrik Ilves has been elected president of Estonia, after narrowly ousting the incumbent Arnold Ruutel.

Following the results on Saturday (23 September), Mr Ilves told reporters in Tallinn that he wishes to take Estonia "more to the centre of Europe."

"Estonia should be among the idea generators in Europe," he said according to Associated Press.

Mr Ilves, 52, was born in Sweden to parents who had escaped the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1944 and later moved to the US where he studied for a degree in psychology at Columbia University in New York.

Before moving to Estonia in 1996, after the country gained independence in 1991, Mr Ilves worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany, and has served as the country's ambassador to the US, Canada and Mexico, and as a member of the Estonian parliament as well as the foreign minister twice.

Since May 2004, Mr Ilves has been an MEP involved in the foreign affairs committee, the temporary committee on CIA activities and in the delegation for relations with the US.

Mr Ilves received 174 votes from the 345 registered members of the Estonian Electoral Assembly, while 162 supported Mr Ruutel.

He will begin his five-year term in office on 9 October and will receive US president George W Bush in November - the first visit to the country by a US president.

Although the role of president is largely ceremonial, Mr Ilves has vowed to use it to raise Estonia's profile on the international stage - pointing to the success of neighbouring Latvia, which will be hosting a NATO summit in November.

'Away for too long'

Critics say Mr Ilves has spent too much of his life abroad to understand current domestic issues saying he has no experience in dealing with Russia, with whom relations have been icy since independence.

"The road to Moscow goes via Brussels," Mr Ilves said at the press conference, when asked how he intends to handle relations with the giant neighbour.

Fellow Baltic countries Latvia and Lithuania also have leaders who fled Soviet occupation in 1944-45. Many Baltic citizens went to the West rather than live under communism, but maintained contact with their homelands until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Latvia's current president Vaira Vike-Freiberga was born in Latvia in 1937, left the country in 1945, and was raised in a displaced-persons camps in Germany and Morocco before moving to Canada in 1954.

She moved permanently back to Estonia in 1998 and was elected president as a non-partisan, compromise candidate in 1999.

Lithuania's current president Valdas Adamkus - the EU's second -oldest president at 79 - was born in Lithuania in 1926 and fought in the resistance during the war of the occupation. He left the country in 1944 and later reached the US.

Mr Adamkus was elected president in 1998, defeated in elections in 2002 and re-elected in 2004 after then-president Rolandas Paksas was removed by parliament.

"It's a response to political corruption and scandals [of the 1990s]. These outsiders are free from that, and bring a fresh transparency and honesty to politics," professor of Baltic politics at Tartu University, Andres Kasekamp, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.