Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga
Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga was president of Latvia from 1999 to 2007, a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal who had left Latvia as a child in 1944 in the retreat from the Red Army, grown up in refugee camps in Germany, in Morocco and in Canada, spent a career on the psychology of memory and the Latvian folk songs called dainas, and come home at sixty to be elected by a deadlocked parliament as the candidate nobody had thought of. In eight years she took the country into NATO and the European Union, both in 2004, spoke for the Baltic states' memory of the Soviet occupation to a Russia that denied it, went to Moscow for the sixtieth anniversary of the victory in 2005 when the Estonian and Lithuanian presidents would not, and left office as the most popular politician in the country and a candidate for secretary-general of the United Nations. She was born in Riga in December 1937, fled with her family at seven, lost a baby sister in a camp in Lubeck, and was schooled in French in Casablanca before the family reached Toronto in 1954. She took degrees at Toronto and a doctorate at McGill, and taught at Montreal from 1965 to 1998, publishing on cognition and on the structure of the dainas, which she had begun analysing by computer in the 1970s. She returned in 1998 to head the Latvian Institute, the body that explained the country abroad, and in June 1999, when the Saeima could not agree on any of the party candidates after six rounds, was proposed and elected in the seventh with fifty-three votes of a hundred. She was reelected in 2003 with eighty-eight. The presidency in Latvia is a voice and a veto, and she used both, sending laws back to the parliament forty times, including the language and citizenship laws that the Russian-speaking third of the population contested, and making the argument abroad that Latvia had been occupied and not liberated in 1940 and 1945. She went to Moscow on 9 May 2005 with a history of the occupation in Russian to give to Putin and said afterwards that he had not read it. Latvia joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the EU on 1 May. She was on the shortlist for the UN in 2006, the first woman, and lost to Ban Ki-moon, and has chaired the World Leadership Alliance and the European Council's reflection group since.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Latvian
- Roles: president, psychologist
