On Friday, the Riigikogu board initated proceedings for a bill presented by 19 MPs that would equate a registered partnership contract to a marriage union.
The bill was presented by 10 Center MPs and nine of the 10 opposition Social Democratic Party (SDE) MPs. The bill would subsume registered partnership contracts, implemented from October 9, 2014, and regulated by the Registered Partnership Act into the Family Law Act, rendering the Registered Partnership Act, also known as the cohabitation act, off the statute book.
The bill follows the scrapping of a planned referendum on the definition of marriage, which in turn fell by the wayside largely with the resignation of Jüri Ratas as prime minister earlier in the week, and consequently the exit of the Center-EKRE-Isamaa coalition.