Favorite Son

Koivisto wins the presidency

The touch was perfect. While they were counting the votes, he was playing a rugged game of volleyball, which was exactly the kind of unassuming conduct that the Finns had grown to expect of him and which they much admire. When the tally was completed, Mauno Koivisto, 58, the son of a carpenter and the holder of a Ph.D. in sociology, last week won 50.1% of the vote, enough to be assured of becoming his country's next President when Finland's 301-member electoral college meets this week. Then Koivisto will officially succeed Urho Kaleva Kekkonen, 81, who resigned in October because of crippling arteriosclerosis after leading Finland for a quarter-century.

Koivisto is the first Social Democrat to be elected President in Finland, but party labels mean little in a country in which all major factions back the welfare state. What won the election for Koivisto was his likable image as a modest and occasionally irreverent individualist. Once a dock worker, he rose to become governor of the powerful Bank of Finland. Koivisto served two terms as Prime Minister, appointed by a man who was his opposite in temperament, the autocratic and short-tempered Kekkonen.

In domestic affairs, Koivisto tends to be austerity-minded (he calls himself a conservative Social Democrat). In foreign affairs, he is expected to do nothing to alter the foundation of his nation's policy: its close working relationship with the Soviet Union, an intimacy that has made "Finlandization" an operative word in every diplomat's vocabulary. During his campaign, Koivisto said that "stable and confidential relations with the Soviet Union have been and will be the central element of Finland's foreign policy." In Finland, no serious and prudent candidate could make any other pledge.

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