page_title: Tarja Halonen
section_title: Second term in office: 2006–2012
hierarchical_section_title: Tarja Halonen / Second term in office: 2006–2012
caption_attribution_description: With President of Finland Tarja Halonen and Prime Minister of Finland Mari Kiviniemi (left).
context_page_description: Tarja Kaarina Halonen is a Finnish politician who served as the 11th President of Finland, and the first woman to hold the position, from 2000 to 2012. She first rose to prominence as a lawyer with the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions, and as the Prime Minister's parliamentary secretary and a member of the City Council of Helsinki. Halonen was a Social Democratic Party member of parliament from 1979 until her election to the presidency in 2000. She also served as a minister at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health from 1987 to 1990, as Minister of Justice from 1990 to 1991, and as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1995 to 2000.
  Halonen was an extremely popular president, with her approval ratings reaching a peak of 88 percent in December 2003. She was re-elected in 2006, defeating National Coalition Party candidate Sauli Niinistö in the second round by 51% to 48%. Ineligible to run in the 2012 presidential elections because of term limits, Halonen left office on 1 March 2012 and was succeeded by Niinistö.
context_section_description: In 2008, Halonen nominated SDP-affiliated Ritva Viljanen for a second term in the Ministry of the Interior. The government had nominated Ilkka Laitinen. Over the course of the previous 50 years, the President had only once chosen to not obey the government's consensus, leading to Halonen thusly being accused of cronyism.
  In September 2008, Halonen was perceived as insulting Estonia by saying that the Estonians suffer from a "post-Soviet stress condition". President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves commented on the issue, saying that "Estonia has never condemned, and will not condemn the foreign affairs decisions of another EU country. It will also not assess the psychiatric state of other EU countries". In 2009, Halonen rejected calls to apologize for Finland's attitude towards Estonian independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
  At the end of her second term Halonen's presidency and economic views received harsh criticism from Björn Wahlroos, the chairman of the two largest banks in Finland.
caption: Tarja Halonen (right) meeting with the third President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev and the then Prime Minister of Finland Mari Kiviniemi (left) in 2010.
exif: {}