Andrus Ansip, the chemist and banker who became the EU's longest-serving premier
For a few months in late 2013 and early 2014, no head of government in the European Union had been in office longer than Estonia's Andrus Ansip. He had started out as a university chemist in Tartu, drifted into banking after the Soviet era, and ended up running his country for nine years.
Born in Tartu on 1 October 1956, Ansip earned a chemistry degree from the local university in 1979 and stayed on as an engineer there until 1983, apart from two years of compulsory military service. In the late 1980s he held posts in the Tartu district committee of the Estonian Communist Party. As the Soviet system unravelled he moved into finance, sitting on the board of the People's Bank of Tartu and managing a Tartu branch of the trading firm Estkompexim from 1989 to 1993.
In 1998 the liberal Reform Party made him mayor of Tartu, a job he kept until 2004 with strong poll ratings. He won parliamentary seats several times but kept giving them up to stay in the town hall. Everything changed in 2004. Party founder Siim Kallas left for Brussels, Ansip took over the party chairmanship on 21 November, and he had already become economy minister in September.
When Prime Minister Juhan Parts resigned in March 2005, President Arnold Rüütel asked Ansip to form a government. Parliament backed him on 12 April by 53 votes out of 101. In the March 2007 election Reform climbed from 19 seats to 31 and he personally drew more than 22,500 votes. Even after output shrank by 14 percent in 2009, when a property bubble built on cheap credit from Nordic banks burst, the party grew again to 33 seats in 2011, and Ansip began a third term.
Voter fatigue with austerity and party funding scandals eventually took their toll, and on 4 March 2014 he stepped down so a successor could lead into the next election. Estonia then sent him to Brussels, where from November 2014 to 2019 he was European Commission vice-president in charge of the digital single market.
Source: Andrus Ansip
