Editing Tarja Halonen (section)

===2000 presidential campaign===
{{Main|2000 Finnish presidential election}}
{{BLP unreferenced section|date=November 2024}}
Halonen announced in 1999 that she wished to stand as a candidate for president in the [[2000 Finnish presidential election|2000 presidential elections]]. In the preliminary elections of the Social Democrats Halonen ran against [[Pertti Paasio]], a member of the European Parliament and former party chairman, and [[Jacob Söderman]], the [[European Ombudsman]]. The incumbent, [[Martti Ahtisaari]], refused to run in party preliminaries and thus announced that he would not run for a second term. Halonen won the preliminaries by a landslide, getting 7,800 out of 12,800 votes.

Halonen was a surprising candidate as she did not represent many traditional values: she was known as a left-wing social democratic party member, who lived in a [[domestic partnership]], was a [[single parent]] and had resigned from [[Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland|the national church]]. Despite starting from fourth place in the presidential election polls, in the first round of the elections, Halonen received the most votes, 40.0%. Her nearest opponent, former prime minister [[Esko Aho]] of the [[Centre Party (Finland)|Centre Party]], received 34.4% of votes.

Since neither of the two candidates got over 50% of the votes, a second round was held. In the second round, Halonen narrowly defeated her opponent with 51.6% against 48.4%, thus becoming Finland's first [[List of elected and appointed female heads of state and government|female head of state]]. Her first term began on 1 March 2000.