Former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb and former Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto will face off on Sunday in the decisive second round of the country’s presidential election.
The president is elected to a six-year term, and his powers are limited. But he co-directs foreign policy with the government, a role that has grown in importance since Finland’s eastern neighbor Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
We would like to introduce brief profiles of the two candidates.
Stubbe, a 55-year-old conservative who served as Finland’s prime minister from 2014 to 2015, returned to politics to run for president after several years in academia and is leading in opinion polls.
He was the director of the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Italy for the past three years after losing the 2018 European Commission presidential election.
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Elected to the European Parliament in 2004, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2008 and later took charge of finance and European affairs.
In 2014, when he was prime minister, he wore shorts to a press conference about the situation in Ukraine and came under fire from the media for playing the part of a human dartboard at a theme park.
According to Stubb himself, one of his biggest mistakes as prime minister was allowing the construction of a nuclear power plant in collaboration with Russian state-owned company Rosatom.
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In 2015, he became finance minister after his party came second in parliamentary elections.
He subsequently lost his seat in the party leadership and left the Finnish parliament in 2017 to work as vice president of the European Investment Bank.
Stubbe, an avid triathlete, is taking a break from competition to focus on his presidential campaign.
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Former Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, 65, a member of the Green Party and running as an independent, was one of the architects of Finland’s entry into NATO and is pushing for a historic policy shift that would end decades of military non-alignment. Supervising.
An experienced diplomat, Haavisto was introduced to conflict resolution when he was sent to negotiate the release of a group of Finnish prisoners of war in Kuwait after the 1990 invasion of Iraq.
He later served as a United Nations diplomat, serving as the EU’s special representative for Sudan from 2005 to 2007, and contributing to the Darfur peace negotiations.
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He previously ran for president twice, in 2012 and 2018, but lost both times to outgoing Conservative President Sauli Niinisto.
Mr Haavisto, who has served as a minister in five different governments, will be one of Europe’s few environmentalists if elected.
Described as a workaholic, he expects his co-workers to follow his diligent work ethic, and is often characterized as assertive and sometimes rude.
Haavisto was gay and is credited with helping to increase openness and tolerance in Finland.
He is also known as an amateur DJ under the name DJ Pexi.
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