Mauno Koivisto
Mauno Koivisto was president of Finland for twelve years, from 1982 to 1994, the Social Democrat who ended the twenty-five-year Kekkonen era and the presidential style that went with it, refused to be a president who ran the government, had the constitution amended to limit his successors to two terms, and steered the country through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the 1948 treaty that had bound Finland to Moscow, the worst recession in its history and the application to join the European Union, which he signed in 1992 and which the Finns approved in a referendum the year he left. He was a docker's son from Turku who fought in the Continuation War in a long-range patrol unit, worked as a carpenter and a docker himself, took a doctorate in sociology at night, and rose through the Bank of Finland to be its governor, finance minister twice and prime minister twice, in 1968 and again in 1979. In 1981 Kekkonen, eighty-one and failing, tried to force the prime minister's resignation and Koivisto refused, saying that the government answered to parliament and not to the president, which no one had said in twenty-five years. Kekkonen resigned in October and Koivisto, the most popular man in the country, won the election of January 1982. The presidency shrank in his hands on purpose. He let coalitions form themselves, kept out of the government's business, said as little as possible in a low voice, and let the constitution be changed to require a popular election and a two-term limit. The line to Moscow he kept, visiting Gorbachev and saying nothing about the Baltic independence movements in 1990 and 1991 that the Estonians have not forgiven. When the Soviet Union fell in December 1991 he had the treaty of friendship annulled within weeks and the EC application ready by March 1992. The banks collapsed the same year, unemployment reached a fifth of the workforce, and he left office in March 1994 to Ahtisaari, the first president chosen by direct vote. He wrote memoirs, kept his silences, and died in Helsinki in May 2017 at ninety-three.
- Lived: 1923 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
