On 17 June 1999, the 7th Saeima elected Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga President of Latvia at an extraordinary sitting. After several unsuccessful voting rounds on party candidates, 53 MPs voted for the non-party psychology professor and folklore scholar from Canada. Latvia thus gained its first woman head of state — a president whose tenure later became closely associated with Latvia’s path toward NATO and the European Union.

The vote took place less than a decade after the restoration of independence, when Latvia was still consolidating its democratic institutions and its Western international orientation. Vīķe-Freiberga’s election symbolically connected the experience of the Latvian exile community with the political center of the restored Latvian state.