Finnish voters this Sunday elected the conservative Alexander Stubb as the new president of their country, who defeated the environmentalist candidate Pekka Haavisto by a narrow margin in the second round of the presidential elections. With the counting concluded, Stubb received 51.6% of the votes and Haavisto 48.4%.
Alexander Stubb, 55, who was prime minister between June 2014 and May 2015, will thus succeed his co-religionist Sauli Niinistö, who has held the position for two six-year terms, as president.
In Finland, the president, in addition to the usual representative function of the head of state, has international and security policy as his main competence, although he agrees on it with the current Government. This specific attribution gives great importance to the presidency in this time of tense relations with Putin’s Russia. The president is commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces and Finland’s highest representative at the Atlantic Alliance summits.
Alexander Stubb, a pro-European politician, is in favor of deep cooperation within NATO, such as allowing the transit of nuclear weapons through Finnish territory – but not their storage in the country – and the permanent deployment of NATO troops in its territory. floor. “Sometimes a nuclear weapon is a guarantee of peace,” Stubb said in a debate Tuesday.
These elections have signaled a new era in Finland, which for decades elected presidents who had to cultivate diplomatic ties with neighboring Russia, forced by geography, avoiding involvement in military alliances so as not to irritate the Kremlin, in a neutrality marked by geopolitics.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted Finland to apply for membership in NATO, which finally occurred in April 2023, and has changed the framework. Thus, the outgoing president Niinistö, who has successfully piloted the NATO accession process, was previously nicknamed ‘Putin’s whisperer’, due to his close relationship with the Russian president.
In another vein, Stubb’s victory consolidates Finland’s turn to the right, as a member of the conservative National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, who has governed since last June at the head of a coalition that includes to the far-right Finns Party and two minor partners: the Christian Democrats and the Swedish minority.
Cai-Göran Alexander Stubb (that is his full name), born in 1968 in Helsinki in a bilingual family – father a native speaker of Swedish and mother of Finnish, the country’s two official national languages ??– is a specialist in foreign policy and European politics. , and apart from having been head of Government, he was minister on three occasions, one of them in the Foreign Affairs portfolio. He had been away from national politics for almost seven years, a period in which he served as vice president of the European Investment Bank (EIB) and was a university professor.
Pekka Haavisto, 65, historic leader of the Greens party although he ran as an independent and the first openly gay presidential candidate, was Foreign Minister in the previous coalition government of social democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin, and was running for the third consecutive time. a presidential election.
