Estonia vs Spain: two digital states, and what can be copied

Estonia is the country Spaniards name when they want to talk about a digital state, and the comparison usually ends in a sigh. The European Commission's own figures tell a more useful story. Spain is one of Europe's strong performers, level with Estonia on several measures, and what is worth copying from Tallinn sits in the plumbing and in the way the state earns its citizens' trust. Two books help read the comparison: Jennifer Pahlka's Recoding America, on delivery, and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, on what happens when a state learns to read its people. For radical centrism the digital state is a test of both.

What the scores say

The Commission's Digital Decade country reports, published in June 2026 with data for 2025, give Estonia 97.19 out of 100 for digital public services for citizens and Spain 91.87, against an EU average of 84.64. For businesses Estonia scores 97.5 and Spain 95.25. On online access to health records Estonia has a perfect 100, and Spain 89.6.

Look one level down and the picture changes. For services offered to national citizens, Spain scores 98.27 and Estonia 97.59. Services run by central government score 87.88 in Spain and 88.35 in Estonia, practically the same. Estonia's lead comes from cross-border services, where it scores 96.79 and Spain 85.48. In Spain, 83.43% of people used a public website or app in the year, above the EU's 76.03%, and pre-filled forms score 95.71.

Spain's weak spots are specific. Regional government services score 86.78, below local government at 96.07. Of all life events the Commission measures, moving house scores lowest, at 81.70. And the report flags transparency of service delivery, design and personal data, at 69.0, and user support, at 86.51 against an EU average of 90.01. The Commission's main recommendation to Spain is to improve interoperability and cooperation between regions, above all in the justice system.

That points to the structural difference. Estonia had 1,360,745 inhabitants on 1 January 2026, according to Statistics Estonia. Spain has 17 autonomous communities, and the Commission's report shows what that means in practice: the national health record has to pull its data from regional health systems, and the digitalisation of justice varies from one region to another. A national digital state in Spain is a federation by necessity.

Estonia has its own problems, and its report is frank about them. Early adoption has left it with ageing services that are hard to use, older people and people with disabilities struggle to reach their online health records, and the government has started consolidating fragmented services, with a plan to cut the cost of digital public services by at least €425 million by 2030.

The plumbing, and the identity

Estonia's backbone is X-Road, open-source software through which public and private databases exchange data. Outgoing data is signed and encrypted and incoming data authenticated and logged. It carries about 2.2 billion transactions a year, offers more than 3,800 e-services and has been federated with Finland since February 2018. It connects public and private organisations alike, and about 78,000 organisations use its services indirectly.

Spain already has the legal half of this. Article 28.2 of Ley 39/2015 gives everyone the right not to hand over documents already held by the administration they are dealing with or drawn up by any other, and tells administrations to fetch them electronically through their networks or data-intermediation platforms. That is the once-only principle, in force since 2015. What Spain lacks is a single layer every region and town hall must use, and a deadline. The Commission notes progress: Mi Carpeta Ciudadana has connected more than 13,000 organisations, integrates 74% of local entities and now shows the Ministry of Health's digital record, which pulls together data from regional health systems.

On identity, the Commission says 91.48% of Estonians used their eID in 2025, across six tools from the ID card to Mobiil-ID; on top of these, the Smart-ID app from SK ID had over 760,000 users in Estonia in 2024 and is also used for banking. Spain measures something narrower: in 2023, 54.43% of Spaniards used their eID for private online services, above the EU's 41.11%, and 13.99% had none. Spaniards juggle the electronic DNI, digital certificates and Cl@ve, and the MiDNI app, launched in April 2025, gets electronic signature in a second phase planned for 2026.

Legibility that runs both ways

Scott warns that states simplify society to make it legible, and that trouble follows when that picture meets confident planners and a weak civil society. A digital state is the most legible state ever built. Estonia's answer is the data tracker, launched on eesti.ee in 2017, where people log in and see which institutions used their data and for what. Even there, at the end of 2025 only 15 of more than 300 state information systems used it. The Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs then proposed making it compulsory for every system holding personal data. The minister, Liisa Pakosta, put it simply: "If an official looks at someone's data, there should be a record of it". The 2024 estimates in the proposal make the case on cost too: about €8,000 to connect a database and €600 a year to maintain it, against €4 to €12 to answer a single citizen's inquiry by email.

Spain is on the same road. Mi Carpeta Ciudadana has a transparency section showing data exchanged between administrations through the state intermediation platform, as the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) explained in 2023, and you can now subscribe to a phone alert when an administration consults your data. It covers that platform and the bodies connected to it.

Estonia also votes online: in the October 2025 local elections 270,818 of 593,883 votes were cast electronically. Spain can leave that for later. Trust in a digital state is built in the everyday procedures first.

What Spain can copy

Our position combines three things. From the left, a public digital infrastructure owned by the state, free for everyone and backed by a counter for those who need one. From the liberal market tradition, a lean, interoperable state with open standards that cuts the cost of paperwork for firms and citizens and lets private services plug in, as private organisations do with X-Road. And from neither, the transparency of the state's own gaze, so that the citizen can read the state as well as the state reads the citizen.

In practice that means a national data-exchange layer, by law, that every ministry, autonomous community and town hall uses, with an open specification so that notaries, banks and private apps can connect with the citizen's consent. Moving house is the first test: you register the new address once and every administration knows. Then once-only with a date: from a set day, any administration that asks for a document another one holds has to fetch it itself, and each publishes how many such requests it still makes. And a full data-access log in Mi Carpeta Ciudadana, covering every state and regional system that holds personal data, showing who looked, when and for which procedure, with alerts switched on by default and the AEPD able to audit it.

Pahlka's lesson is that someone has to own the delivery. Here that owner sits between the state and the regions, with a public timetable, and the 69 on transparency is the number to move first.