Sauli Niinistö
Sauli Niinistö was president of Finland from 2012 to 2024, the first from the conservative National Coalition since 1956, the finance minister of the 1990s who had cut the country out of its depression and taken it into the euro. He was the president who, after twelve years of saying that Finland's line was its own and that NATO was an option to be kept, took the country into the alliance in fourteen months, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which he said had torn the mask off, to the flag-raising in Brussels on 4 April 2023, with the support of the public going from twenty per cent to eighty in the same weeks and the parliament voting one hundred and eighty-eight to eight. He had been the Western leader who talked to Putin most, in Sochi, Helsinki and by telephone, and had hosted Trump and Putin in Helsinki in July 2018. He was the one who said afterwards that there was nothing left to talk about. He was born in Salo in 1948, studied law at Turku, was a district court judge and a lawyer, and entered parliament in 1987. He led the Coalition from 1994 to 2001, as finance minister in Lipponen's rainbow governments of 1995-2003 cutting the debt and the deficit and negotiating the euro entry of 1999. His first wife died in a car crash in 1995, and he survived the tsunami of 2004 in Thailand by climbing a telegraph pole with his sons. He married the poet Jenni Haukio in 2009, with whom he had a son in 2018 at sixty-nine, in office. He lost the presidential election of 2006 to Halonen by three points, and was speaker of the parliament from 2007 to 2011. He won the presidency in 2012 in the run-off and in 2018 in the first round with sixty-three per cent, the highest since the direct election began, on an approval rating that stayed above eighty for most of twelve years, which the press called the Niinistö phenomenon. The presidency's foreign policy powers, shared with the government, he used to the full, with the Kultaranta talks each summer at the presidential villa and a column of his own in the country's argument. The NATO decision was announced with the prime minister Marin on 12 May 2022. Sweden's membership was pushed alongside through the Turkish and Hungarian delays. The border with Russia, thirteen hundred kilometres, was closed in November 2023 when Moscow began sending migrants to it. He handed over to Stubb in March 2024, wrote the European Union's report on civil and military preparedness that October at von der Leyen's request, and remains the country's elder, the one who was right to talk and right to stop.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, politician
