Petteri Orpo, on April 27 in Helsinki. Behind, from left, the leader of the Finnish Party, Riikka Purra; the leader of the Swedish People’s Party, Anna-Maja Henriksson; and that of the Christian Democrats, Sari Essayah. Heikki Saukkomaa (AP)
Almost two and a half months after Finland’s general election, Petteri Orpo, the Conservative leader, announced Thursday night that he had reached a governing agreement with the far-right and two other minority formations, the Christian Democrats and the Swedish People’s Party (RKP). Orpo reported late last night that negotiations between the four formations were complete. The details of the pact and the allocation of ministerial portfolios will be announced this Friday at the earliest. “All questions have been clarified and the papers are in place,” said Orpo, the Nordic country’s next prime minister.
After the parliamentary elections on April 2, in which the conservatives and the far-right narrowly defeated the social democrats – the three formations achieved a very even result with 19.9% to 20.8% of the vote – Finnish President Sauli Niinistö commissioned Orpo with the formation of the government. The 53-year-old Conservative leader, a skilled negotiator, took three weeks to announce he would seek a coalition agreement with the far-right Finns Party, the Christian Democrats and the RKP. The four parties hold 108 of the 200 seats in the Eduskunta (parliament).
Orpo had a choice of leaning towards the Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant party as a main partner, or opting to add its seats to those of the Social Democratic Party, which ruled until its election defeat. If there had been an agreement with the Social Democrats, it would have been easy to include other left- or right-wing formations in the coalition. Finally, Orpo, former Minister of Agriculture, Interior and Finance, decided to join forces of the National Coalition, the party he led, with those of the Finns Party, the Christian Democrats and the RKP and started the formation of the most right-wing forces in the History of the Nordic country.
It will not be the first time that the extreme right has entered a Finnish executive. Between 2015 and 2017, the National Coalition and the far-right party (then called the True Finns) were part of a tripartite government led by the Center Party’s Juha Sipilä, a formation with an agrarian tradition that was formed this time after their election debacle, shut down the possibility of a new edition of this coalition and announced his intention to spend four years in opposition.
The new four-party government will succeed the five-party coalition led by Social Democrat Sanna Marin in the last parliamentary term. The RKP, which has its strongholds in municipalities with a Swedish-speaking majority, will evolve from a part center-left executive to a hard right-leaning government.
The Conservative leader reiterated during the election campaign and after his victory his intention to lower the tax burden and implement a €6,000 million budget adjustment over the next four years by cutting public spending and increasing productivity and employment rates. Disagreements with the Social Democrats on economic issues made a grand coalition based on the German model impossible, Orpo argued. For his part, Marin, who will no longer lead the Social Democratic Party next autumn and lost the election despite the high popularity ratings, has warned during weeks of negotiations between the four formations on the far right of the Finnish parliamentary arch that there is a risk that those in of society are “in a weaker position” will end up “suffering from the consequences” of the new government.
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disagreements
The success of the negotiations between the four right-wing formations was not guaranteed. One obstacle was the discrepancies between the ultra-right and the RKP. The Finns Party focused its election campaign on minimizing “toxic migration from outside the EU” and reversing the ecological transition that the Social Democrats had undertaken in recent years; two points that obviously made Swedish-speaking politicians uneasy. The discrepancies on language issues and around the cultural rights of minorities were also evident. Far-right leader Rikka Purra admitted more than once during the negotiating rounds that the immigration issue was the main obstacle to an agreement. The leader of the RKP youth, Julia Ståhle, announced her resignation a few days ago as a sign of rejection of the agreement reached with the ultra-right.
The future prime minister could have tried to reach an agreement only with the extreme right and the RKP, as they would have added 103 seats. However, he preferred to include the five Christian Democrat MPs in order to bring more stability to the executive.
Orpo, who appeared this Thursday along with the leaders of the other three formations, refused to give details of the programmatic agreement. The conservative politician limited himself to emphasizing again that there would be no more marginal notes and that only the translation of the agreed text into Swedish and English remained. Some Finnish political analysts have highlighted in recent days that the trial was not only the second longest trial in Finnish democracy (after that of 1951), but was also much more opaque than usual, leaking virtually no information to the press.
Finland’s new government will clearly be in line with Sweden’s government, which saw an unprecedented political turnaround in the Scandinavian country after September’s elections, which produced an executive made up of Conservatives, Liberals and Christian Democrats with crucial parliamentary support far right.
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