Tarja Halonen
Tarja Halonen was president of Finland for twelve years, from 2000 to 2012, the first woman to hold the office, a trade-union lawyer from the working-class Kallio district of Helsinki who had been a single mother, an unmarried partner who married in office, a former chair of the gay rights association SETA, and a member of no church, and who was elected twice by narrow margins and left office with approval ratings above eighty per cent. The Finns called her Moominmamma. She was born on Christmas Eve 1943, read law at Helsinki, and worked for the central trade union federation before entering parliament for the Social Democrats in 1979 for the Kallio seat she held for twenty-one years. She was minister of social affairs, of justice, and from 1995 foreign minister in Lipponen's rainbow coalition, the years of Finland's first EU presidency and the arguments about NATO, which she opposed. The election of 2000 was the first fought without the presidency's old powers over the government, which the new constitution of that year had transferred to the prime minister, and she won the second round against Esko Aho by fifty-one and a half per cent. The office as she held it was foreign policy and the voice. She opposed the Iraq war in 2003, kept Finland out of NATO and said so, spoke for the UN and for the Nordic welfare state at every forum, co-chaired the UN's panel on globalisation and later its panel on sustainability, and was reelected in 2006 against Sauli Niinisto by fifty-two to forty-eight. Her partner, a law professor, became her husband in August 2000 after twenty years together, and the couple's refusal to be anything but what they were was the point of her popularity. Her interest in the Moomins was real. She left office in March 2012, constitutionally barred from a third term, and has chaired international commissions since, including the World Bank's council on gender and the UN high-level panel on the global response to health crises.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, politician
