Career
Katainen grew up in Siilinjärvi and was a part-time teacher and he became a member of the Siilinjärvi municipal council in 1993. He was elected member of the Finnish Parliament (Eduskunta) from the district of Northern Savonia in 1999, served as the vice-chairman of his party since 2001, becoming its leader in 2004.
In March 2003, he was elected Vice President of the European People's Party (EPP) for a three-year term.
In the 2007 parliamentary election, the National Coalition led by Katainen won the second place from the Social Democrats. Katainen became the Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in the new cabinet with Center, National Coalition, Greens, and Swedish People's party.
In November 2008, the Financial Times named Katainen as the best finance minister in Europe. Katainen warned in 2009 that Europe's leaders must do more to prepare voters for “exit strategies” that bring spiralling public sector debts back under control, noting that "It is always politically difficult but we simply have no choice. We will have to do very painful things in forthcoming years when the economy has started to recover."
Read more about this topic: Jyrki Katainen
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)