Profile: Juha Sipila: From business man to rising political star
Xinhua, April 20, 2015 Adjust font size:
The Center Party of Finland won the parliamentary election late Sunday, and its chairman Juha Sipila will have to start negotiations to form a new government. He will take up the post of prime minister.
Sipila was a successful IT businessman before turning to politics in Finland.
Born in 1961 in Veteli, a small town in western Finland, Sipila completed his master's degree in engineering from the University of Oulu in 1986.
His career started in Lauri Kuokkanen, first as a thesis worker and later as a product manager. At the beginning of the 1990s, he joined Solitra Oy, a company producing radio frequency components. He became the company's CEO in 1998.
In 1995, Sipila founded Fortel Invest, a technology-focused private equity finance company. He was the managing director of his own company from 1998-2002.
During the period of 2002-2005, Sipila served as CEO of Elektrobit, an IT company, and served on the boards of quite a few companies, after which he returned to lead Fortel Invest, until he was elected to the Parliament in 2011.
Reports said he is one of the first IT millionaires in the Oulu region, a major IT center in northern Finland.
"Companies are part of society. Their primary role is to create jobs and bring economic well-being to the area where the company operates," Sipila had said in earlier interviews.
When he was a student, Sipila worked in the Finnish Center Youth for a short time, and this was known as his only experience in politics before he was elected as a member of parliament in 2011.
Sipila rose rapidly as a political star. In May 2012, he was elected chairman of the Center Party. He is an advocate of decentralized society and rural development.
During the election campaign of 2015, Sipila said Finland needs a very strict spending discipline. He has provoked debates by claiming that the number of public servants should be reduced by tens of thousands.
On economic matters, he expressed confidence that investments in the bio-economy will create 200,000 new jobs in Finland. He also maintained that agricultural entrepreneurs, who suffer disproportionately, need to be supported.
Regarding immigration issues, Sipila and his Center Party raised proposals to make work-based migration more liberal. He maintained that employers in Finland should be prepared to relax their Finnish-language requirement and accept English as a working language.
On foreign and security policy, he considered that Finland should keep military non-alignment as a corner stone.
Sipila's distinctive political ideas and unassuming personality has won him popularity across Finland. Endit