Country at-a-glance
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Written by Gary A. Seidman
SwitchYard Media, Inc. - contact | website
Designed and produced by Kent Harris
Tin Can Rocket, LLC. - contact | website
A production of SwitchYard Media, Inc.
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Pierre-Michel Virot
President Michelle Bachelet, Chile
A divorced, socialist, agnostic, who had never held public office, Bachelet was elected Chile’s first woman president in 2006.
''Violence ravaged my life,'' she said in an election night speech. ''I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred.''
Bachelet is a survivor of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Her father, an air force general, was tortured and died in prison under the Pinochet regime. Bachelet and her mother were detained and tortured. In 1975, they were exiled to Australia and later East Germany, where the future president studied medicine. She finished medical school on her return to Chile in 1979. She is the mother of three. She speaks five languages, including English, which she learned while living in Maryland as a child in the early ‘60s.
Capital: Santiago, Chile
Population: 16.3 million
Primary Language: Spanish
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 75 yrs (m), 81(w)
Currency: Chilean peso
Per Capita Income: US $5,870
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Erin Siegal
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia
Often called the “Iron Lady,” the diminutive grandmotherly Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has had a political career spanning nearly 30 years, culminating in her election as Liberia’s president in November 2005.
She is the world’s first black woman president and the first woman to be elected president in Africa. Her political ascent has hardly been easy. She was tossed in prison in the 1980s for criticizing President Samuel Doe, and after initially backing a rebellion by Charles Taylor, was charged with treason after he became president. Exile saved her more than once.
While abroad, Johnson-Sirleaf worked for Citibank and the World Bank. She was educated in Monrovia and several U.S. universities, including Harvard. Divorced, Johnson-Sirleaf has four sons and several grandchildren. She was inaugurated in January 2006, before a crown that included Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush.
Capital: Monrovia, Liberia
Population: 3.6 million
Primary Language: English
Major Religion: Christianity, Islam and indigenous beliefs
Life Expectancy: 41 yrs (m), 43 (w)
Currency: Liberian dollar
Per Capita Income: US $130
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider
President Mary McAleese, Ireland
Mary McAleese was first elected as Ireland’s president in 1997, and was re-elected – having run unopposed -- in October 2004 to another seven year term. She is the eighth president of Ireland, and the first one to come from Northern Ireland, succeeding another woman, Mary Robinson.
McAleese was initially seen as an odd choice. The eldest of nine children, she grew up as a Catholic in a Protestant neighborhood of Belfast at the start of the violence known as “The Troubles.” She went on to become a barrister, a professor of law and a television journalist, which launched her political career.
McAleese is married to Dr. Martin McAleese, who is a dentist and accountant. They have three children.
Capital: Dublin, Ireland
Population: 4 million
Primary Language: English, Irish
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 75 yrs (m), 80 (w)
Currency: Euro
Per Capita Income: US $40,150
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras
Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany
Angela Merkel has had a meteoric rise in German politics. A pastor%27s daughter and professor of physics in communist East Berlin, Merkel%27s interest in the West, participation in the democracy movement and membership in the Christian Democratic Union caught the notice of then-West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl when the Berlin Wall fell.
Anxious to get an East German woman into the government, Kohl picked Merkel to become his minister for women and then the environment. When the Kohl government lost the 1998 election, Merkel was named secretary-general of the opposition CDU. In 2005 she challenged and beat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to become the first woman and first former citizen of Communist East Germany elected chancellor.
Fluent in English and Russian, Merkel divorced her physicist husband in 1982 and married a chemist in 1998.
Capital: Berlin, Germany
Population: 82.5 million
Primary Language: German
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 76 yrs (m), 81 (w)
Currency: Euro
Per Capita Income: US $34,580
Photo Credit: Brian P. Biller
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Philippines
Politics is in the DNA of Gloria Arroyo. Her father, Diosdado Macapagal, was the ninth president of the Philippines. Arroyo became the 14th president in January 2001, when Joseph Estrada was toppled in a bloodless coup following allegations of corruption. She is the country's second female president after Corazon Aquino.
Arroya began her career as an economics professor, and first sought elected office in 1992 when she won a senate race. In 1998, she was elected vice president. Arroyo studied for two years at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she was a classmate of Bill Clinton.
She is married to Jose Miguel Tuason Arroyo, a lawyer who is the grandson of the late Senator Jose Ma Arroyo. Arroyo and her husband have three children.
Capital: Manila, Philippines
Population: 85.2 million
Primary Language: Filipino, English
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 68 yrs (m), 72 (w)
Currency: Philippine peso
Per Capita Income: US $1,300
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Ryan Brown
President Tarja Halonen, Finland
Look familiar? Finnish presidents aren’t exactly recognizable to most Americans, but Halonen is that rare exception -- at least if you are a late night television viewer.
Halonen was the subject of an ongoing Conan O’Brian routine after someone pointed out the resemblance. Conan even got in the mix during Halonen’s 2006 re-election campaign. She was first elected in 2000, the country’s first woman president. Politically, she was very left for much of her life, in favor of closer relations with Moscow during the 1970s. Halonen came up through local politics, eventually winning a seat in parliament and serving in several ministerial positions. In the 1980s, she headed a gay and lesbian rights organization.
Halonen is married, has one child and speaks a half dozen languages.
Capital: Helsinki, Finland
Population: 5.2 million
Primary Language: Finnish, Swedish
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 75 yrs (m), 82 (w)
Currency: Euro
Per Capita Income: US $37,460
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Office of the Presidency, Argentina
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner , Argentina
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a former senator for Buenos Aires Province and the wife of President Nestor Kirchner, swept to victory in the October 2007 election. A good deal of her appeal was the record of her husband, who successfully cut poverty and unemployment following the devastating 2001-2002 economic crisis.
Fernández%27s political career began as a law student in the 1970s when she was active in the leftist Peronist movement. She later became a provincial and national deputy.
She is Argentina’s second female president after Isabel Martínez de Perón, but the first to be elected. She has two children.
Capital: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Population: 38.2 million
Primary Language: Spanish
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 71 yrs (m), 78 (w)
Currency: Peso
Per Capita Income: US $4,470
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Office of the Prime Minister, New Zealand
Prime Minister Helen Clark, New Zealand
Helen Clark was born into a farming family in 1950 and got her first taste of politics as a Vietnam War demonstrator.
Clark taught political science for several years until winning a seat in parliament in 1981. Eight years later, in 1989, she became the country’s first female deputy prime minister, and in 1999 she was elected prime minister.
During her term, Clark has introduced a number of social policy initiatives, including child tax credits and a decision to legalize prostitution. Her government opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has been active in environmental issues.
Capital: Wellington, New Zealand
Population: 4.1 million
Primary Language: English, Maori
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 77 yrs (m), 81 (w)
Currency: N.Z. dollar
Per Capita Income: US $25,960
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
Prime Minister Luísa Dias Diogo, Mozambique
While President Armando Guebuza is the head of state, Luísa Dias Diogo is the head of government. Diogo is the first woman prime minister in Mozambique.
Her government career began in the Finance Ministry, where in 1982 she held the post of National Budget Director. She then became deputy minister of finance and minister of finance.
Diogo has focused on poverty eradication and economic growth, and in 2004 she launched an Aids emergency program that included education and economic assistance for people suffering from the disease.
Capital: Maputo, Mozambique
Population: 19.4 million
Primary Language: Portuguese, Makua-Lomwe, Tsonga, Shona
Major Religion: Indiginous beliefs
Life Expectancy: 41 yrs (m), 43 (w)
Currency: Metical
Per Capita Income: US $310
Photo Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras
President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia
Born in Riga in 1937, Vaira Vike-Freiberga criss-crossed the globe in her early years, which accounts for her fluency in English, French, Latvian, Spanish and German.
In 1944, as the Soviets began their occupation of Latvia, Vike-Freiberga%27s family headed for a refugee camp in Germany. Five years later, her family moved to Morocco, and a few years after that to Canada, where Vike-Freiberga attended university and received a PhD in pyschology. In 1965 she became a professor at the University of Montreal, specializing on the relationship between thought and language.
Her career took a dramatic new direction in 1998, when she returned to Latvia to head the Latvian Institute. Within a year, she was elected president and served two terms, ending in July, 2007. She is married and has two children.
Capital: Riga, Latvia
Population: 2.3 million
Primary Language: Latvian, Russian
Major Religion: Christianity
Life Expectancy: 66 yrs (m), 77 (w)
Currency: Lats
Per Capita Income: US $6,760