Sauli Niinistö

Biography

Sauli Niinistö was born in Salo in 1948. He studied law at the University of Turku, graduating in 1974, ran his own law firm in Salo from 1978 to 1988 and sat on the town council from 1977 to 1992. He was elected to the Finnish parliament in 1987.

In 1994 he became chairman of the National Coalition Party, and the next year he joined Paavo Lipponen's cabinet as justice minister and deputy prime minister. From 1996 to 2003 he was finance minister, known for strict fiscal policy during Finland's entry into the euro. He stepped down as party leader in 2001 and, after leaving the cabinet in 2003, became a vice-president of the European Investment Bank.

As his party's candidate in 2006 he reached the presidential runoff but narrowly lost to Tarja Halonen. In the 2007 parliamentary election he won a record personal vote, and he served as speaker of parliament until 2011. In 2009 he was also elected president of the Football Association of Finland.

Niinistö won the 2012 presidential election, beating Pekka Haavisto with 62.6 percent in the runoff, and took office on 1 March 2012. Running as an independent in 2018, he was re-elected in the first round, the first Finnish president to achieve that by popular vote. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he and Prime Minister Sanna Marin backed Finnish membership of NATO, which followed in April 2023. He left office in March 2024 after two terms.