Alexander Stubb
Alexander Stubb has been president of Finland since March 2024, elected in the run-off of February 2024 against the Green former foreign minister Haavisto by fifty-two per cent to forty-eight. He is the first president of the NATO member, the triathlete and academic with the doctorate on European integration from the London School of Economics who had been a member of the European Parliament, foreign minister in 2008-11, European affairs and trade minister, prime minister for a year in 2014-15 when Katainen left for Brussels, and finance minister in 2015-16. He lost the National Coalition's leadership to Orpo in 2016 and went to the European Investment Bank and then to the European University Institute in Florence, from which the party called him back in 2023 as its candidate. The presidency has been the war next door, the American question after Trump's return, with which he has dealt by golf, playing a round with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in March 2025 and winning the tournament, which the president has mentioned since. He has been the ally who explains Europe to him. There has been the defence agreement with Washington, the border with Russia kept closed, the Finnish-Swedish coordination inside the alliance, and a foreign policy of values and interests that he has set out in a book, The Triangle of Power, arguing that the global west must deal with the global south or lose it to the global east. He was born in Helsinki in 1968 to a Swedish-speaking father who ran the ice hockey federation and a Finnish-speaking mother, played ice hockey and golf, studied at Furman University in South Carolina on a golf scholarship, at the College of Europe and at the LSE, worked for the foreign ministry and for the Commission president Prodi's team on the constitutional treaty. He was elected to the European Parliament in 2004 with the largest personal vote in the country. The Georgian war of August 2008 fell in his first months as foreign minister and as chairman of the OSCE. He was the mediator in Tbilisi with Sarkozy. The prime ministership of 2014-15 was a lost election and a slogan about mental health that the country did not forgive. He tweets in three languages and runs a marathon a year. He has said that Finland's place is at the table where the decisions are made, which for a century it was not.
- Lived: 1968 CE – ?
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
