Estonia’s northeastern border city of Narva now has two rival city council chairmen and two rival mayors, ERR reports. Earlier, the opposition Estonian Centre Party and populist Plan B movement gained a majority in the city council and decided to convene a city council meeting on their own, given that the incumbent chairman, Mihhail Stalnuhhin, had refused to do so since March 2026. The opposition-led city council elected Plan B leader Urbo Vaarmann as its new chairman and the Centre Party’s Jaan Toots as mayor. Meanwhile, Stalnuhhin’s Narva 2.0 alliance and incumbent mayor Katri Raik’s Respect alliance insisted that the city council meeting was unlawful and refused to attend. Raik said that Aleksei Jevgrafov, the Centre Party’s group leader in the city council, had “great difficulty keeping his word and telling the truth,” and that Plan B leader Vaarmann was a “criminal,” ERR reported. If Stalnuhhin and Raik refuse to hand over power, the opposition plans to turn to the Ministry of Justice. However, Justice Minister Liisa Pakosta pointed out that the national government had neither grounds nor authority to exercise state supervision over the activities of the Narva city council, ERR reported.
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