Jussi Halla-aho

Jussi Kristian Halla-aho (born 27 April 1971) is a Finnish politician, currently serving as the Speaker of the Parliament of Finland since 2023.

During the 1980s he travelled to the Soviet Union with his father, who was a bus driver.

The trip was the spark for his anti-leftist convictions.

When Halla-aho was young he worked as a waiter.

When conscripted, instead of military service he chose civilian service.

He later expressed regret at his decision, calling the choice a "stupid political protest", and voicing support for the present conscription system.

After high school graduation, Halla-aho enrolled in Pirkanmaa Hotel and Restaurant Institute, where he obtained a professional degree to become a restaurant waiter.

Halla-aho studied at the University of Helsinki from 1995 until 2006.

After obtaining a master's degree in 2000, he continued with doctoral studies, and obtained a Ph.D. in 2006, focusing his dissertation on historical nominal morphology of Old Church Slavonic.

He has published one article in an academic journal.

After graduation, he left academia and worked on a part-time basis supported by short-term academic grants.

He was first elected to the Helsinki City Council in 2008 and to the Finnish parliament in 2011.

Halla-aho was elected a member of Helsinki City Council in the 2008 municipal elections as a candidate of the Finns Party (previously known as True Finns), although he was not a member of the party until 2010.

In the 2008 elections, he was the 18th most popular candidate in the entire country and the second most popular candidate of the Finns Party after the party leader Timo Soini.

Halla-aho won the largest number of personal votes for the party in Helsinki.

Halla-aho was elected to parliament in 2011.

His vote share was the sixth highest in the country and the second highest within his party.

In the parliament he was made chairman of the Administration Committee, which deals with immigration affairs among other matters.

However, in the summer of 2012 Halla-aho resigned from the position of committee chairman, while staying as a member of the committee.

Halla-aho was re-elected to the Helsinki City Council in 2012, being the third most popular candidate nationwide.

Previously, between 2014 and 2019, he was a member of the European Parliament, where he was part of the Identity and Democracy group.

Halla-aho has a PhD in Slavic Studies.

Before entering national politics, he was best known for criticising multiculturalism and Finland's immigration policies in his online blog, Scripta.

In 2014 he was elected to the European Parliament.

Halla-aho was elected to the European Parliament in 2014.

He was the second most popular candidate in the election with 80,772 votes.

He sits in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR).

He is a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and a substitute member of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection.

Halla-aho has served as a member of the Parliament of Finland from 2011 to 2014 and again since 2019, and as the leader of the Finns Party from 10 June 2017 to 14 August 2021.

He was elected leader of the Finns Party in the summer of 2017, defeating Sampo Terho, after which the majority of the party's MPs seceded in protest and formed a new party.

In 2017, Halla-aho announced he would run for the party chair in the Finns Party leadership election, as the long-time leader of the party Timo Soini decided not to seek another term.

During the campaign, Halla-aho and Sampo Terho emerged as the leading candidates, according to opinion polls.

Halla-aho emerged victorious in the party conference in Jyväskylä on 10 June, winning a majority of delegates in the first round, and was officially nominated as the Leader of the Finns Party.

His selection resulted in a political crisis in Finland, as the leaders of the two other governing coalition parties, Prime Minister Juha Sipilä of Centre and Finance Minister Petteri Orpo of the NCP, stated they would not co-operate with the Finns Party led by Halla-aho.

The two leaders argued that their decision was based on value differences between them and Halla-aho's policies, and that the Sipilä Cabinet would duly be dissolved.

In spite of this, Halla-aho led the Finns Party to success in the 2019 election: it recovered all of its lost seats, becoming the second-largest party in parliament (after the Social Democratic Party), and Halla-aho won the largest share of personal votes in the country.

Halla-aho has served as Speaker of Parliament since 21 June 2023.

In 2024, he ran for President of Finland.

Halla-aho grew up in Tampere and lived there 24 years.

His mother was from Alajärvi.