Estonian Ministers Quit Amid Row

TALLINN, Estonia -- In the continuing row over the leadership of the Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar, two ministers in his ruling coalition resigned on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Liberal Democratic Party said.Finance Minister Heike Kranich and his Liberal Democrat colleague, Paul-Erik Rummo, the culture and education minister, handed in their resignations at a government meeting, Reuters quoted the unidentified spokesman as saying.Kranich, whose party is one of four junior partners in the coalition led by Laar's right-of-center Fatherland party, had threatened several times to resign if the prime minister remained in office.Laar, 34, defied his critics at the weekend by crushing a revolt from within his party that had been widely expected to topple him.To roaring applause, Laar was re-elected chairman of Fatherland at a special conference of the party. Had he lost that position, he said, he would have also resigned as prime minister.New hurdles -- including a possible no-confidence vote in the parliament, and not to mention elections to be held in 1995 -- lie ahead.But for the moment, Tallinn has been stunned into quiet by a victory that virtually no one had expected. Last week, every major newspaper, dozens of television and radio commentators and most politicians had been confidently predicting Laar's demise -- a victim of his own successful yet painful economic reforms.However, behind the self-effacing rhetoric he was orchestrating events with a masterful touch. Laar took advantage of unusual party conference rules that require no quorum and allow any of the Fatherland's roughly 1,000 card-carrying members to vote -- assuming they can make it to Tallinn. Those members who show up -- whether nine or 900 -- decide the party's future.Naturally, Laar packed his supporters in: This conference, with 352 delegates, was almost twice the size of previous conferences. While his opponents -- basking in a society-wide consensus that Laar was all but dethroned -- apparently neglected to marshal their supporters, Laar, as he later admitted, spent weeks lobbying friendly regions far from Tallinn to send delegates.The vote will boost Laar's radical economic reforms, which have turned Estonia into the economic tiger of the former Soviet Union and have won him fame in IMF and World Bank circles. The Estonian budget is currently balanced with unemployment at a mere 2 percent, and inflation was an acceptable 33 percent in 1993, and the newly established Estonian kroon, which is one of Europe's most stable currencies. Such polls prompted the revolt: Party members who are afraid of losing power in the next elections have began to whisper that Laar had been running the Fatherland into the ground, and that economic reforms had to be slowed.The behind-doors debate blossomed into a full-blown public crisis two weeks ago.: Then Laar fired his defense minister, Indrek Kannik, and prompting Justice Minister Kaido Kama to resign in protest. The two then promptly organized the party conference to challenge Laar.Some 60 percent of delegates supported Laar over Kama and a third challenger, Ulo Nugis, the speaker of parliament and former director of a Soviet lamp factory.