Nine candidates are vying for Finland’s presidency on Sunday, led by former foreign minister Pekka Haavisto and prime minister Alexander Stubb.
The president, who is chosen for a six-year term, is not very powerful. However, he co-leads the government in foreign policy, a role that has grown in significance since Russia, Finland’s neighbor to the east, invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The three primary contenders are briefly described here.
Alexander Stubb, a 55-year-old conservative who served as Finland’s prime minister from 2014 to 2015 After a number of years in academics, Stubb has entered politics once more to run for president, and he currently leads the polls.
After losing the 2018 election to lead the EU Commission, he served as director of the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Italy for the previous three years.
After being elected to the European Parliament in 2004, he went on to hold the portfolios of finance and European affairs until being appointed as foreign minister in 2008.
When he was prime minister in 2014, he faced criticism from the press for showing up to a press conference regarding the situation in Ukraine in shorts and then playing human darts in a theme park.
One of Stubb’s worst blunders as prime minister, he admits, was authorizing the building of a nuclear power plant with Rosatom, the state-owned company in Russia.
He became the Finance Minister in 2015 after his party lost the legislative elections.
After that, he lost the party leadership, and he departed the Finnish parliament to take a job at the European Investment Bank as vice president in 2017.
Stubb, an avid triathlete, has suspended his competitions in order to concentrate on the presidential campaign.
Architect of NATO Pekka Haavisto; former foreign minister One of the masterminds of Finland’s NATO membership, 65-year-old Pekka Haavisto of the Green Party is running as an independent. He oversaw a dramatic policy shift that ended decades of military non-alignment.
As an accomplished diplomat, Haavisto received his training in handling conflicts when he was assigned to arrange the release of a group of Finns who had been imprisoned in Kuwait following Iraq’s invasion in 1990.
Later, he participated in the Darfur peace negotiations as an EU Special Representative for Sudan and as a United Nations ambassador from 2005 to 2007.
He previously made two unsuccessful bids for the presidency, in 2012 and 2018, to the departing conservative president Sauli Niinisto.
If elected, Haavisto, who has held ministerial positions in five different governments, would be among the few prominent environmentalists in Europe.
Often described as a workaholic, he is also known for being pushy and often rude, demanding his coworkers to share his diligent work ethic.
Haavisto, a gay man, is recognized for having contributed to Finland’s greater acceptance and tolerance.
He also goes by the moniker DJ Pexi when working as an amateur DJ.
linguist Jussi Halla-aho, who opposes immigration
Jussi Halla-aho, 52, a candidate for the far-right Finns Party, is now ranked third in the polls.
Though he does not resemble a populist politician, the present speaker of parliament is soft-spoken and reserved, and he has the party’s full support.
Halla-aho’s political career can be attributed to his contentious blog, Scripta, which he launched in 2005 and used to criticize both immigration and the media.
The media has focused on the blog and reader comments because of their associations with far-right ideology and prejudice.
His 2008 blog entries criticizing Islam and Somalis led to his conviction for interfering with religious devotion and inciting ethnic strife.
When the far-right Finns Party grew from being a minor force to the third largest in parliament in 2011, he was elected as an MP.
A longtime opponent of Russia, he issued a warning in 2019 against the Nord Stream gas pipeline project.
He is unwaveringly pro-Ukrainian; in fact, last year, he received a medal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Halla-aho, a former linguist with a PhD in Old Church Slavonic, is proficient in Ukrainian and gained recognition for his linguistic abilities when he spoke in the Ukrainian parliament in November of last year.