Jan Pellervo Vapaavuori (born 3 April 1965) is a Finnish politician, the former Minister of Economic Affairs, and the former mayor of

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

. Vapaavuori was Minister of Housing and Minister of Nordic Cooperation in Matti Vanhanen's second cabinet and Mari Kiviniemi's cabinet. He was a candidate for the head of his party (the

centre-right Centre-right politics is the set of right-wing politics, right-wing political ideologies that lean closer to the political centre. It is commonly associated with conservatism, Christian democracy, liberal conservatism, and conservative liberalis ...

National Coalition Party The National Coalition Party (NCP; , Kok; , Saml) is a liberal conservatism, liberal-conservative List of political parties in Finland, political party in Finland. It is the current governing political party of Finland. Founded in 1918, the ...

) in the June 2014 election, and as part of that the likeliest interim Prime Minister of Finland. However he eventually failed to make the eventual head-to-head round within the Coalition Party, which saw

Alexander Stubb Cai-Göran Alexander Stubb (, born 1 April 1968) is a Finnish politician who has been the 13th president of Finland since 2024. He previously served as Prime Minister of Finland from 2014 to 2015. Rising in politics as a researcher specialis ...

defeat Paula Risikko. Vapaavuori has been a Helsinki City Council member since 1997. He has been a member of the Parliament since 2003, from the constituency of Helsinki, and he represents the

. From 2011 to 2012 he was the chairman of the party's parliamentary group. Vapaavuori was elected

Mayor of Helsinki In many countries, a mayor is the highest-ranking official in a municipal government such as that of a city or a town. Worldwide, there is a wide variance in local laws and customs regarding the powers and responsibilities of a mayor as well a ...

in 2017. His term started on 1 June 2017. In November 2020 Vapaavuori announced that he will not be seeking re-election and plans to retire from politics. Vapaavuori acquired a law degree from

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...

in 1989. He continued his studies in Helsinki,

Uppsala Uppsala ( ; ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the capital of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inhabitants in 2019. Loc ...

The Hague The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...

and

Hanken School of Economics Hanken School of Economics (, also known as Hanken) is a business school in Finland with two campuses, Helsinki and Vaasa. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest business school in Finland, and one of the oldest in the Nordic countries. Its programme ...

as well. He has worked in the National Union of University Students in Finland. Vapaavuori was born into a bilingual family: his father, Panu, is a Finnish jurist and mother, Gun, was a Swedish teacher. He is married to Outi Laitinen-Vapaavuori, a doctor of veterinary medicine.

References

External links

Jan Vapaavuori website

Jan Vapaavuori profile
at Council of State website 1965 births Living people Politicians from Helsinki Finnish people of Swedish descent National Coalition Party politicians Ministers of trade and industry of Finland Members of the Parliament of Finland (2003–2007) Members of the Parliament of Finland (2007–2011) Members of the Parliament of Finland (2011–2015) Mayors of Helsinki {{NationalCoalition-politician-stub