Biographies of Presidents

Hu Jintao biography

2010-01-06T05:07:00.000-08:00

orn: December 1942
Birthplace: Anhui Province, China

Hu Jintao became president of the People's Republic of China in 2003, succeeding Jiang Zemin. Hu, a trained engineer, joined the communist party in 1964 and quickly worked his way up, gaining notice in Beijing as a leader in the Communist Youth League. Most of his career was spent in western China, overseeing Gansu, Guizhou and Tibet.

Picked for the Central Committee's Political Bureau in 1992 by Deng Xiaoping, Hu was the first modern Chinese leader to start his political career after the 1949 communist revolution.

In 2002 all other senior leaders of the Central Committee stepped down to make way for a "fourth generation" of party officials, but Hu remained, leading political analysts to conclude that Hu would eventually take over for President Jiang Zemin. (The same year Hu was named General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.) Although he has been considered a reformer by some, Hu also has demonstrated his loyalty to traditional policies of Beijing, including the rigid control over political opposition; in 1989 Hu imposed martial law in Tibet to deter pro-independence demonstrations. Since taking office as president, Hu has taken charge of the China's military and reached out diplomatically to countries around the world.

Nicolas Sarkozy - Biography

2009-12-21T06:16:00.000-08:00

Date of Birth Nicolas Sarkozy
28 January 1955, Paris, France

Has been President of France since 16 May 2007.

In April 2004, he became Minister of Economy and Finances

His father Pál István Ernõ Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born in Budapest, 5 May 1928) is a Lawyer from Hungarian nobility, who immigrated to France after the Soviet occupation of Hungary in WWII, and his mother Andrée Jeanne Mallah (born in Paris, 12 October 1925) was of Greek descent on her father's side and French on her mother's side. They married in Paris on 8 Feb 1950.

Head of the French conservative party UMP and the winner of the 2007 presidential elections.

Has three sons: Pierre Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born in 1985) and Jean Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born in 1987) with his first wife Marie-Dominique Culioli, Louis Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born in 1997) with his second wife Cecilia Albeniz.

Minister of the Interior from 7 May 2002 to 31 March 2004 and from 31 May 2005 to 26 March 2007.

Was elected President of France, the sixth in the Fifth Republic, in the second round of the 2007 election by 53.06% of the votes (6 May 2007).

Horst Köhler - Biography

2009-12-18T11:28:00.000-08:00

Horst Köhler, born 22 February 1943 in Heidenstein, Generalgouvernement, today Skierbieszów, Poland) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union, and the current President of Germany. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, and the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Assembly on 23 May 2004 and was subsequently inaugurated on 1 July 2004. He was reelected to a second term on 23 May 2009.

Prior to his election as President, Horst Köhler had had a distinguished career in politics, the civil service and as a banking executive. He was President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1998 to 2000 and head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2000 to 2004.

Although the office of President is less influential than that of the Chancellor, and mostly concerned with ceremonial matters, Horst Köhler has become Germany's most popular politician during his tenure, with record-high approval ratings. He has called for more influence for the President, and has suggested the President should be directly elected again, as was the case under Germany's Weimar Constitution.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - Biography

2009-12-15T06:19:00.000-08:00

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born on 27 October 1945 at Garanhuns, in the hinterland of Pernambuco State. Later on, as admitted by Brazilian legislation in the cases where a person becomes better known by a nickname than the real name, he added "Lula" to his name of birth. The name Lula, in Portuguese, means squid (the marine animal), but is also the nickname of many people called "Luiz". Lula is the seventh of the eight children born to Aristides Inácio da Silva and Eurídice Ferreira de Mello.
President Lula In December 1952, the family traveled 13 days on the back of a truck (“pau-de arara”) and settled in Vicente de Carvalho, a poor neighborhood of the city of Guarujá, in São Paulo State. Lula received basic schooling at the Marcílio Dias Public School. In 1956, the family moved into a bedroom at the back of a bar in the Ipiranga neighborhood.

At age 12, he landed his first job at a local cleaners. Later he became a shoeshine and an office boy. At 14 he got his first fixed employment at a warehouse. He later transferred to a metal parts factory and got a placement in a lathe worker-training course offered by the National Service of Industry - SENAI, a training scheme for industrial workers funded by the public and private sectors. After a three-year course, Lula graduated as a metal worker.

In the strife that followed the 1964 military coup, Lula worked in various factories before joining the Villares Industries, one of the major metal works in the country. It was located in São Bernando do Campo, in the ABC region (ABC is an acronym of the three large cities which compose that industrial cluster: Santo André, São Bernardo and São Caetano), the industrial heartland of São Paulo State. There, his brother José Ferreira da Silva, better known as Frei Chico, brought him into contact with the labor movement.

In 1969, Lula sought a seat on the council of the Metalworkers Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema. In 1972, he was elected first secretary.In 1975, he became president of the 100 thousand-strong union with 92% of the votes. It was at this time that Lula gave a new direction to the Brazilian labor movement. In 1978, Lula was reelected union president and there soon followed the first work stoppages in 10 years since a government-sponsored clampdown on union activities.

In March 1979, 170 thousand metalworkers paralyzed the ABC region. Under his charismatic leadership, memorable meetings were held in the local stadium (in Vila Euclides) in defiance of police intimation. Repression against striking workers amidst almost absolute absence of political representation of worker rights in the National Congress led Lula to first consider creating a workers party.

At this time, Brazil was undergoing a gradual process of political decompression under the reins of the Armed Forces, then holding power. On February 10 1980, Lula founded the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores - PT) together with other union members, intellectuals, politicians and representatives of social movements, such as rural and religious leaders.
In the same year, a new strike by metalworkers led to government intervention in the union and to the imprisonment of Lula and other union leaders, as authorized by the (now derrogated) National Security Law. They were held for 31 days, during which his mother died (Lula was allowed to attend the funerals).
Lula arrested by dicatorship
Lula´s mug shot

By 1982, the PT had been established throughout almost the entire country. Lula guided the Party’s organization and ran in the São Paulo State gubernatorial elections, having come forth. In August 1983, he took part in the setting up of United Workers’ Federation (Central Única dos Trabalhadores - CUT ).
In 1984, he was one of the leading lights of the “diretas-já” campaign in favor of free elections for President. In 1986, he was elected with the largest number of votes (650.134) of any congressman to the parliamentary assembly charged with writing a new constitution for the country.

The PT slated Lula for the presidential elections of 1989, the first one in 29 years. He lost in the second round by a slim margin, and two years later championed the national campaign against corruption that led to the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello.

In 1994 and 1998, Lula was again a candidate, having lost both times to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who channeled the fears of change of a significant section of the electorate.

In the last week of June 2002, the PT’s National Convention agreed to a wide ranging political alliance with other political parties (PL, PcdoB, PCB and PMN)under a platform of social inclusion for the great majority of the Brazilian people. The vice-presidential candidate on Lula’s ticket was Senator José Alencar, of the Liberal party (PL), from Minas Gerais State.

On 27th October 2002, at the age of 57, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected President of the Federative Republic of Brazil with almost 53 million votes.

Silvio Berlusconi - Biography

2009-12-10T07:42:00.000-08:00

Silvio Berlusconi (born Sept. 29, 1936, Milan, Italy)
Italian media tycoon and prime minister of Italy (1994; 2001 – 06); reelected 2008.

After graduating from the University of Milan, he became a real estate developer, amassing a considerable fortune by the 1970s. By the 1990s he owned more than 150 businesses, including three television networks and Italy's largest publishing house.

In 1994 he founded Forza Italia, a conservative political party, and was elected prime minister. Faced with conflict of interest and other charges, he resigned in December 1994. He was later convicted of fraud and corruption, though the convictions were eventually overturned. Despite these charges and criticism of his control of much of the Italian media, he remained the leader of Forza Italia and again became prime minister in 2001. His support of the Iraq War proved unpopular, and he struggled to improve the country's economy. In the 2006 elections his coalition was defeated by a centre-left bloc headed by Romano Prodi. Following Prodi's resignation in 2008, Silvio Berlusconi won a third term as prime minister.

Vladimir Putin - Biography

2009-12-09T11:48:00.000-08:00

Born: 7 October 1952
Birthplace: Leningrad, Russia (now St. Petersburg)

Vladimir Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation in 2000 as the hand-picked successor of Boris Yeltsin. After earning a law degree in 1975, Vladimir Putin joined the KGB, the security force of the former Soviet Union. He spent years working primarily in East Germany, then left the service in 1991 and became active in the politics of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).

He was brought to Moscow by Yeltsin in 1996 and served as an administrator in the Kremlin and an official for the security organizations which replaced the KGB.

In 1999 Vladimir Putin became Yeltsin's fifth prime minister in 17 months, then became acting president when Yeltsin left office. He was officially elected to the office in 2000 and then re-elected in a landslide vote in March of 2004. As president he gained a reputation as a clever and ruthless political operator with a hunger for Russian power and not too much concern for the niceties of democracy or diplomacy. He stepped down in 2008 (as required by term limits) and was replaced by his own hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev then installed Putin as prime minister, a move which left Putin, as The New York Times put it, as "the country's dominant politician, with a firm grip on power."

Barack Obama - Biography

2009-12-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

Date of Birth
4 August 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Barack Obama was born to a white American mother, Ann Dunham, and a black Kenyan father, Barack Obama, Sr., who were both young college students at the University of Hawaii. When his father left for Harvard, she and Barack stayed behind, and his father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. Barack's mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager and moved to Jakarta when Barack was six. He later recounted Indonesia as simultaneously lush and a harrowing exposure to tropical poverty. He returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. The family lived in a small apartment - his grandfather was a furniture salesman and an unsuccessful insurance agent and his grandmother worked in a bank - but Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii's top prep academy. His father wrote to him regularly but, though he traveled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten.

Barack Obama attended Columbia University, but found New York's racial tension inescapable. He became a community organizer for a small Chicago church-based group for three years, helping poor South Side residents cope with a wave of plant closings. He then attended Harvard Law School, and in 1990 became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He turned down a prestigious judicial clerkship, choosing instead to practice civil-rights law back in Chicago, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation. He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. Eventually he ran as a Democrat for the state senate seat from his district, which included both Hyde Park and some of the poorest ghettos on the South Side, and won.

In 2004 Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, representing Illinois, and gained national attention by giving a rousing and well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. In 2008 he ran for president as a democrat and won. He is set to become the 44th president of the Unites States and the first African-American ever elected to that position.