Presidential elections were held in Estonia on 20 September 1992, alongside parliamentary elections. As no candidate received over 50% of the vote, a second round was held in Parliament on 5 October 1992, in which Lennart Meri was elected. Voter turnout in the public vote was 68%.
This was the only time to date that an Estonian presidential election included a public vote. Planned direct elections for the head of state in 1934 were cancelled due to a coup, and after 1992 presidential elections reverted to being carried out in the Electoral College or in Parliament, as had been the case in 1938.
Campaign
Out of the seven candidates that announced their intention to run for the presidency, only four - Arnold Rüütel, Lennart Meri, Rein Taagepera and Lagle Parek managed to get enough signatures to set up their candidacy.
Third-place candidate Rein Taagepera later wrote that his candidacy was motivated by two things - he considered himself the only candidate with experience in democratic politics, having lived in exile during the Soviet occupation, and he feared that Rüütel would want to strengthen the role of the presidency, making him unfit to oversee a parliamentary democracy.
During the campaign, a controversy arose involving Ando Leps, associated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, allegedly planning a damaging letter against Lennart Meri, accusing his father of collaboration with the NKVD and KGB. As a pre-emptive response, Meri's team strategically placed a letter in the paper Liivimaa Kroonik that would redirect the narrative to implicate Meri's father in collaboration with multiple intelligence agencies, mitigating the impact of Leps' subsequent accusations which surfaced a few days later.