Sauli Niinistoe romanced a former beauty queen and survived the Indian Ocean tsunami by climbing a tree, but with the Finnish presidency within his grasp, the drama in his life may be far from over.
If it was his time as finance minister that has earned Niinistoe, of the National Coalition Party, widespread respect and credibility, it may also be the turbulent events in his life that could help him win votes in Finland’s second round of presidential poll on Sunday.
The conservative veteran politician lost his wife of more than 20 years and the mother of his two sons in 1995 to a tragic road accident.
Photo: EPA
Nine years later, he narrowly escaped the tsunami in Thailand by climbing a tree with his younger son.
Before remarrying in 2009 his party’s spokeswoman 29 years his junior, Niinistoe was engaged to an ex-beauty queen turned parliamentarian, although that relationship ended a year after the engagement.
Beyond the personal drama, Niinistoe had earned credibility through his role in pulling Finland from the abyss of recession in the 1990s.
“It was one of the high points of his political career and people remember him fondly for this,” Turku University parliamentary researcher Ville Pernaa said.
Helsinki University political science professor Tuomo Martikainen agreed, saying that for many Finns, “Niinistoe represents practical economic expertise.”
The presidential campaign set against the backdrop of the eurozone crisis has focused on Niinistoe’s unwavering support for the common currency, which was introduced in Finland while he was finance minister from 1996 to 2003.
The avid rollerskater’s broad political experience — not just as finance minister, but also justice minister and deputy prime minister — has also won him endorsements from most of the candidates who did not make it to the second round.
According to the most recent opinion poll, he has a broad support of 64 percent, nearly twice that of his Greens contender Pekka Haavisto.
Described by some as impatient and rude and by others as honest and forthright, Niinistoe may however have a shortcoming in foreign policy.
“The role of the president calls for relations with the wider world,” Helsinki University political science professor Jan Sundberg said.
Niinistoe lacked experience in “areas relating to the environment, developing countries or Asian economies,” Sundberg said.
The last of four children born to working class parents in southwestern Finland, the 63-year-old earned his law degree at Turku University.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS