Kersti Kaljulaid
Kersti Kaljulaid was president of Estonia from 2016 to 2021, the first woman and, at forty-six, the youngest, the auditor at the European Court of Auditors whom the parliament elected in October 2016 as the compromise nobody had heard of after the electoral college had failed five times to choose between the party candidates. She became in five years the most popular politician in the country and the one the parties least controlled. She was the president who refused to shake hands with a minister of the far-right EKRE party in April 2019 and wore a sweatshirt reading Speech is Free to the swearing-in of a government that included it. She told the party's ministers that their insults to Finland's prime minister Marin, a sales girl, and to the country's foreign partners were not Estonia's voice. She went to Moscow in April 2019 to open the renovated embassy and met Putin, the first Baltic head of state to do so in a decade. She ran the pandemic's communications from the palace when the government would not. She was born in Tartu in 1969, studied genetics at Tartu and took an MBA there, worked as a sales manager for a telephone company and an investment banker. She was the prime minister Laar's economic adviser in 1999-2002, and ran the Iru power station for Eesti Energia. She sat on the Court of Auditors in Luxembourg from 2004 to 2016, chairing the council of the University of Tartu meanwhile. She rides a motorcycle and has four children. The presidency's five years were the government crisis of 2019 that brought the EKRE into office, the corruption scandal that took it out in January 2021 and brought Kallas in. There was the digital state promoted at every summit, the seat on the Security Council in 2020-21, which Estonia won with her campaigning, and the marriage referendum on same-sex unions that the EKRE wanted and she opposed and that fell with the government. There was the parliament's refusal in 2021 to re-elect her, since no party would nominate a president who had told them what she thought. The director of the national museum was chosen instead. She was the UN secretary-general's global advocate for women's and children's health from 2021, sought the secretary-generalship of the OECD and the NATO secretary-generalship without success. She chairs the Estonian olympic committee. She has said that she would take the presidency again if the parliament could bring itself to ask, which in 2026 it may.
- Lived: 1969 CE – ?
- Nationality: Estonian
- Roles: president, politician
