Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Toomas Hendrik Ilves was president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016, the bow-tied American-raised diplomat who had run the Estonian service of Radio Free Europe in Munich in the 1980s, come home to be ambassador in Washington in 1993 and foreign minister from 1996, in which office he negotiated the country's entry into the European Union's first wave of eastern candidates in 1997, ahead of Latvia and Lithuania. As president he made Estonia's e-state the country's brand. There were the digital identity card, the online voting, the tax returns in five minutes, the e-residency that let foreigners run Estonian companies from anywhere. There was the NATO cyber-defence centre in Tallinn founded after the Russian cyber-attack of April 2007, when the moving of a Soviet war memorial from the city centre brought two nights of riots and three weeks of attacks that took the banks, the ministries and the newspapers offline, the first such attack on a state. It made him the West's spokesman on the subject for a decade. He was born in Stockholm in 1953 to Estonian refugees, grew up in Leonia, New Jersey, studied psychology at Columbia and Pennsylvania, taught and worked as a programmer in Vancouver. He joined Radio Free Europe in 1984. He learned to speak Estonian as a public man in his forties, which the country never let him forget. He sat in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2006 before the parliament elected him president over Rüütel in the electoral college on the third round. The two terms were the euro adopted in January 2011, the first of the Baltics. There were the Bronze Night's aftermath and the cyber doctrine, and the Georgian war of 2008 in which he flew to Tbilisi with the Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian presidents. There was the quarrel with Paul Krugman in 2012 over austerity, conducted on Twitter and turned into an opera, and the Russian seizure of the Estonian security officer Kohver on the border in September 2014, two days after Obama had spoken in Tallinn. He married three times, the last to a Latvian official in 2016. He moved to Stanford as a fellow, and lives between Palo Alto and his farm at Ärma in the south of Estonia. He has said that the country that was occupied for fifty years has the right to be paranoid, and that the paranoids were right.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Estonian
- Roles: president, diplomat, politician
