She started her campaign for the presidency at the beginning of 1999 after President Martti Ahtisaari announced that he would not stand for a second term in the office.

During the campaign, there were rumours spread by some political opponents of Ahtisaari that he had a drinking problem or that he had knowingly accepted a double salary from the Finnish Foreign Ministry and from the United Nations while trying to negotiate an end to the Bosnian War.

During the three-week campaign between the two rounds of presidential elections, Ahtisaari was praised by his supporters for being more compassionate towards the many unemployed Finns than Rehn, who as Defence Minister had to officially support the Aho government's strict economic policies.

They all became influential forces behind Martti Ahtisaari campaign.

The couple has one son, Marko Ahtisaari, a noted musician and producer.

As one of the most radical political organizations in Kosovo, the party opposes the Ahtisaari plan and the current presence of the United Nations and European Union in the region, advocating total independence for Kosovo.

Martti Oiva Kalevi Ahtisaari (; born 23 June 1937 ) is a Finnish politician, the tenth President of Finland ( 1994 – 2000 ), Nobel Peace Prize laureate and United Nations diplomat and mediator, noted for his international peace work.

His father, Oiva Ahtisaari ( whose grandfather Julius Marenius Adolfsen had emigrated with his parents to Finland in 1872 from Tistedalen in Southern Norway ) took Finnish citizenship in 1929 and changed his surname from Adolfsen in 1937.

After completing his military service ( Ahtisaari holds the rank of captain in the Finnish Army Reserve ), he began to study through a distance-learning course at Oulu teachers ' college.

Besides his native language, Finnish, Ahtisaari speaks Swedish, French, English, and German.

Contrary to some of his predecessors and his successor as the Finnish President, Ahtisaari ended all of his New

President Ahtisaari supported Finland's entry into the European Union, and in a 1994 referendum, 57 percent of Finnish voters were in favour of EU membership.

Often encountering resistance from the Finnish parliament, which preferred a more cautious foreign policy, as well as from within his own party, Ahtisaari did not seek re-election in 2000.

In Finnish politics, Ahtisaari has stressed how important it is for Finland to join NATO.

However, Ahtisaari then told the Finnish state broadcaster YLE that " he wished the mission would fall on someone else " which it ultimately did in the person of Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and longtime U. N. diplomat.

* Martti Ahtisaari, Finnish president

Holkeri was awarded the highest Finnish honorary title of Valtioneuvos ( Counselor of State ) in 1998 by the President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari.

In 1998 Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari said that " Finland's official position is that it does not have territorial demands on Russia.

* Other Club de Madrid members involved in the diplomatic process include Helmut Kohl, the former Chancellor of Germany who oversaw the reunification of East and West Germany, who was a signee to the Dayton Accords, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who urged support for Canada's participation in Operation Allied Force, and Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari who, along with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, convinced Serbian President Slobodan Milošević to retreat from Kosovo in accordance with NATO's demands.

Four Finnish presidents have lived there: Mauno Koivisto, Martti Ahtisaari, Tarja Halonen, and the incumbent Sauli Niinistö.

In November 2005, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Ahtisaari as Special Envoy for the Kosovo status process which was to determine whether Kosovo, having been administered by the United Nations since 1999, should become independent or remain a province of Serbia.

In February 2007, Ahtisaari delivered a draft status settlement proposal to leaders in Belgrade and Pristina, the basis for a draft UN Security Council Resolution which proposes ' supervised independence ' for the province.

* Presidents Mauno Koivisto and Martti Ahtisaari – appear as an epilogue to every episode, sitting on a park bench.

Ahtisaari served as UN undersecretary general for administration and management from 1987 to 1991 causing mixed feelings inside the organization during an internal investigation of massive fraud.

Laureates during his times as chair were Shirin Ebadi ( 2003 ), Wangari Maathai ( 2004 ) the International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei ( 2005 ) Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank ( 2006 ), Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( 2007 ), and Martti Ahtisaari ( 2008 ).

Since the presidency of Martti Ahtisaari, all surviving recipients of the Mannerheim Cross have been invited to the Independence Day Reception, hosted by the president.

President Martti Ahtisaari and the coalition governments led Finland closer to the core EU in the late 1990s.

The incumbent, Martti Ahtisaari, refused to run in party preliminaries and thus announced that he would not run for a second term.

UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland, leads the status process with Austrian diplomat Albert Rohan, his deputy.

Ahtisaari brought the parties together for the first direct dialogue in February 2006 to discuss decentralization of local government, an important measure in the protection of Kosovo Serb communities.

On 24 July 2006, Ahtisaari brought the parties together in Vienna for the first high-level talks on the status outcome itself.

Ahtisaari later told the press that the meeting resulted in no breakthroughs, but added that the discussion was " frank and candid " and the atmosphere was better than he could have expected.

Ahtisaari briefed Contact Group foreign ministers on 20 September 2006, in New York City at a meeting chaired by U. S. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

On 2 February 2007, Ahtisaari delivered to representatives in Belgrade and Pristina a draft status settlement proposal.

Ahtisaari conducted several weeks of consultations with the parties in Vienna to finalize the Settlement, including a high-level meeting on 10 March 2007 that brought together the Presidents and Prime Ministers of both sides.

Concluding that there was little hope of the two sides reconciling their positions independently, Ahtisaari said he would submit to the UN Security Council his own proposed status arrangements, including an explicit recommendation for the status outcome itself, by the end of March.

On Monday, 16 July 2007, after many weeks of discussions at the Security Council, Russia rejected a fifth draft of a Security Council resolution based on the Ahtisaari proposals.

Nevertheless discussions proceeded with UN Commissioner for Namibia N ° 2 Martti Ahtisaari who played a key role in getting the Constitutional Principles agreed in 1982 by the front-line states, SWAPO, and the Western Contact Group.

Former UN Commissioner N ° 2 and now UN Special Representative Martti Ahtisaari arrived in Windhoek in April 1989 to head the UN Transition Assistance Group's ( UNTAG ) mission.

UNTAG's Martti Ahtisaari took advice from British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was visiting Southern Africa at the time, and authorized a limited contingent of South African troops to assist the South West African Police in restoring order.

Ahtisaari was a UN Special Envoy at the Kosovo status process negotiations, aimed at resolving a long-running dispute in Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008.

The Nobel statement said that Ahtisaari has played a prominent role in resolving many conflicts in Namibia ; Aceh, Indonesia ; Kosovo and Iraq, among other areas.

Kuopio was where Ahtisaari spent most of his childhood, eventually attending the Kuopion Lyseo high school.

In 1952, Martti Ahtisaari moved to Oulu with his family to seek employment.