Guntis Ulmanis
Guntis Ulmanis was president of Latvia from 1993 to 1999, the first head of state of the restored republic, elected by the first parliament chosen freely since 1931, the Saeima of June 1993, at the third ballot. He was a man whom nobody had heard of a year before and whom the country chose in part for his name. His great-uncle Kārlis Ulmanis had been the last president before the Soviets, the one who had told the country in 1940 to stay at its posts while he stayed at his, and had died in a Soviet prison. The great-nephew had paid for the name. The family was deported to Siberia in 1941 when he was two, came back in 1946, and was sent out of Riga again. He grew up under a surname the regime did not like, studied economics, and spent the Soviet years as a planner and a manager of the Riga municipal services, joining the party because that was what a manager did, and leaving it in 1989. The presidency was the two terms of the reconstruction. The Russian army went out in August 1994, after the negotiation over the Skrunda radar station that he conducted with Yeltsin. There was the citizenship law of 1994, which left a third of the population without a passport and which he sent back to parliament once and signed the second time. There were the naturalisation windows opened in 1998 after the referendum, and the banking collapse of 1995 when Banka Baltija took a third of the country's deposits with it. There were the seven prime ministers, and the application to NATO and the European Union, both lodged on his watch, both refused at first. There was the pension law of 1998, which the pensioners answered with a referendum. He was constitutionally weak and used what he had, the power to return a law and the power to nominate a prime minister. The country's judgement, when he left in July 1999, was that he had been dull and that dull had been what it needed. He went into business afterwards and chaired the organising committee of the 2006 ice hockey championship. He sat in the Saeima from 2010 to 2011 for a party that vanished. He writes memoirs.
- Lived: 1939 CE – ?
- Nationality: Latvian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
