Conservative leader Petteri Orpo celebrates election victory in Helsinki this Sunday Associated Press / LaPresse (APN)
The conservative National Coalition Party won the parliamentary elections this Sunday in Finland and its leader Petteri Orpo is the favorite for the Nordic country’s future government. In a very close election, the Conservatives gained 20.8% of the vote, ahead of a booming far right, which achieved its best result (20.1% of the vote) but didn’t quite get the first position it had been aiming for in the vote already checked. Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) is relegated to third place with 19.9% of the vote.
Despite a better result for the Social Democrats than in 2019, the president’s options for remaining in office are practically zero. The distribution of seats benefits the two right-wing parties; The National Coalition gets 48 MPs, compared to the 46 achieved by the nationalist and anti-immigrant party and the 43 that leaves the Marin-led formation.
The National Coalition and the Finns Party could add their seats to unseat Marin, although they will need the support of at least one other faction. Orpo, 53, has shown himself willing to “agree with all factions” during the election campaign. His final victory over the far-right party gives him a privileged negotiating position. Between 2015 and 2017, both the National Coalition and the Finns Party were part of a coalition executive that eventually imploded due to differences between the leaders of both parties. Analysts are not completely ruling out the possibility of an agreement between Conservatives and Social Democrats, although tensions during the campaign and the chasm separating them on economic matters are seriously complicating negotiations. Marin has in recent weeks categorically rejected any possibility of governing with the far right, which he has described as “openly racist”.
Orpo, who has been Minister of Agriculture, Home Affairs and Finance for the past decade, declared himself the winner of the elections just after 11pm local time (10pm in mainland Spain). “It was a great victory!” he told supporters at the National Coalition’s headquarters in Helsinki. “The Finnish people are demanding a change, and now I will start negotiations to form a new government,” he said. A few minutes later, the social democrat Marin admitted defeat, acknowledging that “the winners” of the meeting were the National Coalition and the Party of Finns. “My party has gained support and we have more representatives in Parliament, which makes me very happy,” emphasized the President.
Marin, 37, came to these elections with the intention of confirming her position as prime minister. The leader, who has enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the Nordic country in recent decades, is in power just over three years after her predecessor Antti Rinne resigned to avoid a motion of no confidence. Marin has spent the last 40 months leading a five-party coalition. His chances of staying in office were curtailed a few weeks ago when the Center Party, which has strongholds in rural areas, said it would not be part of a new executive branch composed of the same five formations (Social Democrats, Centre, Greens). , Alianza de the Left and the Finnish-Swedish People’s Party). With the exception of the SDP, the other parties in the current governing coalition have worsened their results compared to 2019. Most political analysts in the Nordic country think it is unlikely that Marin will be ready to lead the opposition for the next four years.
tight elections
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The very close elections took place at a crucial moment for Finland. The country of 5.5 million people is on the verge of completing the historic turning point that began almost a year ago by abandoning its neutrality and applying for NATO membership, a process that has started after recent approval in the parliaments of Hungary and the United States Hungary’s entered the final stages of Turkey, which will be completed in the coming weeks. However, the election campaign did not focus on joining the Atlantic Alliance or supporting the government of Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, but on economic issues related to rising commodity prices and energy costs, transition and high national debt.
In the 2019 general election, the SDP narrowly won the National Coalition and the Finns Party. The three parties, which obtained between 17% and 18% of the votes in the previous elections, improved their results this Sunday. The 200 seats of the Eduskunta (unicameral parliament) are elected in 13 constituencies in a proportional representation system applying D’Hondt’s law, so the party with the highest number of votes is not guaranteed its position as the first parliamentary force.
The SDP came to election day with some options to lead the next Finnish government, thanks to Marin’s popularity, which is much higher than that of the party. Nevertheless, the president, who in 2019 became the youngest head of government in the world at the time, was met with deep rejection in parts of Finnish society. While most citizens see her as a strong leader who successfully navigated the Covid-19 pandemic and the NATO accession process following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, others believe she is a politician with little experience and the main person responsible for the surge the Finnish national debt has increased over the past few years.
Sanna Marin, this Sunday, when the result of the early voting was announced, at the SDP headquarters in Helsinki.Emmi Korhonen (AP)
The National Coalition, which has led all polls for more than two years, campaigned throughout the election campaign to defend the need for deep fiscal adjustments at a time when inflation is soaring and the Finnish economy is pointing to a mild recession this year. Orpo accused Marin of not worrying about the national debt and lack of initiatives to boost economic growth. For her part, the social democrat declared during the election campaign that the conservative wanted to “take away from the poor in order to give more to the rich”.
The final leg of the election campaign has not been positive for the National Coalition, which has seen the huge rift that a year ago removed it from the far-right rapidly narrowing. The Finns Party has won at least 17.5% of the vote in all parliamentary elections since 2011, but has never prevailed. In recent months, the Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant formation, whose list is headed by a woman for the first time, Rikka Purra, 45, has risen at a rapid pace with a successful campaign on social media and by winning the surge in energy prices and the cost of living-related the war in Ukraine. The far-right party wants to put an end to “harmful” immigration of non-EU citizens, advocates a long-term exit from the European Union and flatly rejects the goal of climate neutrality by 2035.
Two clear losers on Election Day were the Center Party, which at 11.3 percent had its worst result since 1917, and the Green League, which gained 7 percent of the vote, almost five percentage points less than in 2019.
The negotiations on the future formation of the government are expected to be tedious and likely to last for weeks. A coalition of the two main forces on the right would need the support of the Center Party, with which they already governed between 2015 and 2017 with the centrist Juha Sipilä as prime minister. Another option that could allow the right-wing forces to get the required 101 seats might be to reach an agreement with the Christian Democrats and with the Finnish-Swedish People’s Party, although the linguistic differences between the Finns’ Party and the formation have their own Feuds in predominantly Swedish-speaking cities make negotiations between the two difficult.
Finns Party leader Rikka Purra in Helsinki this Sunday JONATHAN NACKSTRAND (AFP)
More than 40% of voters exercised their right to vote early in the last few days of March, a record number in a country that introduced the option in 1970. The turnout in these general elections was 71.9%, down one percentage point from 2019.
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