Honourable Electoral Body,
Dear Estonian people!

I thank you for your confidence.

I fully understand that throughout these presidential elections you have had to ask yourself numerous questions and seek answers to these questions. You have sought and found an answer from your conscience, your near ones, your constituency, that is the people of Estonia. You reached an answer, the answer of the Estonian people, which involves balanced rights as well as responsibilities.

This is a heavy load.

This is a heavy load for me as a president and heavier still for me as a person. I know that the load of this decision has been equally heavy for you, honourable electoral body, honourable representatives of counties and members of parliament, or in short: it has been heavy for all of us for it is our common load.

Yet our common load has also given us a common relief: our constitution, which the lawyers do not regard as faultless, proved, however, to be operational in the recent elections.

The Estonian Republic has been able to maintain the consistency of its political line. By saying so I do not wish to bring discredit upon my fellow candidates. I only wish to emphasise that Estonia should not lavish its strength on attempts to prove the continuing of our existing line. My honourable fellow candidates would inevitable have had to waste their strength, ingenuity, and above all, their time on proving this common truth of ours. And time, as you know, is regrettably short for reasons concerning both foreign and domestic policy.

But in front of the electoral body I would like, first and foremost, to share my reflections: indeed, what is democracy after all; how does this commonly used word materialise itself in our daily life.

Democracy is a continuous facing of choices. We can be proud of our country and our people that for half a century, during which the totalitarian regime had degraded the process of making choices to a farce, that this half a century did not rob us of our experience of history, of our sense of responsibility. We are a state which has an experience of history, which possesses a skill of relying on this experience and progressing from there.

In our decision making we have not limited ourselves to the capital only. Our counties and villages have had their say. Thus the constitutional notion of municipality or self-government acquires a true meaning: this really is self governing.

Today it is important to realise - and I am also telling this because of myself - that elections are not just an act that ends with the announcement of the electoral body's decision. In the course of discussions and debates various attitudes were brought forward, various concepts were presented which will provide material for further analysis and which will certainly have a substantial impact on the Estonian statehood on the threshold of the turn of the millennium. We have every reason to thank A.Rüütel, T. Kelam, E. Tõugu and, even more so, the unfortunately sole representative of the stronger sex Siiri Oviir, all of who devoted their political experience to projecting the future course of Estonia. Also I wish to thank all of these who voted for my fellow candidates. This is the way the mechanism of democracy works.

We all know that several processes have proved more complicated than it seemed at the time of joint manifestations of the Singing Revolution.

In the life of our state and our people there is a number of choices that have the utmost importance, which demand as wide-ranging a consensus as possible, a unity, or as one, fluent in our mother tongue, should say - a joint way of thinking, which would be free of pettiness and ephemeral party interests, which in respect of differences of opinion would lead us to joint action.

Our national sense of solidarity obliges us to seek this joint way of thinking in dealing with the key issues of the day and warding off today's hazards.

As president of Estonia I regard it as the cornerstone of our joint tasks.

Thank you once again from all my heart.

I know that years full of work await us.

But I also know that with a common frame of mind Estonia has managed, and so shall we manage, too.

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