Finland is heading towards a very probable new conservative government after the elections on Sunday that punished the social democracy of the Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, and is heading towards NATO membership, which will take place today, as announced the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, and the Finnish President, Sauli Niinistö.
The coincidence in the times has no political meaning, since in Finland all the parties and the bulk of society support the accession to NATO, a conviction that arose from the Russian invasion of Ukraine now a little over a year ago. It is the economy that has eroded Marin and his team to the point of losing the legislative elections, despite the fact that the social democrat SDP has even won votes.
The results of the appointment with the polls show a clear shift to the right in Finnish society. The conservative National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) won 20.8% of the vote, followed by the far-right Finns Party (previously called True Finns) with 20%, and in third place the social democrat SDP from Marin, which garnered the 19.9%. Kokoomus leader and likely future prime minister Petteri Orpo said “there is a crucial issue and that is the economy; we have to fix our economy, we have to make reforms to push it towards sustainable growth.â€
Petteri Orpo, 53, a political scientist by training, has led the Kokoomus party since 2016, after challenging and defeating his predecessor, Alexander Stubb, who was also prime minister. Orpo, a deputy since 2007, has been a minister in several coalition governments: Agriculture and Forestry (2014-2015), the Interior (2015-2016) and Finance (2016-2019). He campaigned promising to curb spending and wipe out the high public debt, which now stands at around 73% of GDP. He is considered a moderate person and a good negotiator.
Orpo announced that he will open talks with all parties, regardless of their ideology, in order to forge “a government with a solid majority.” From this option, already in the campaign, he did not exclude the Finns Party, led for just two years by Riika Purra. According to the count, both parties have 40.8% of the vote, which translates into 48 and 46 seats, respectively, in the 200-seat Finnish unicameral Parliament. The SDP has achieved 43 deputies.
The foreign press asked him yesterday if he is willing to form a government with the ultra-right, to which the conservative leader replied: “In Finland there are no ultra-right parties,” reports Efe from Helsinki.
Curiously, in 2017 Orpo himself, in his time as Finance Minister, agreed with the then prime minister, the centrist Juha Sipilä, to expel True Finns (that was his name at the time) from the government coalition due to the far-right emphasis he gave to party its new president, Jussi Halla-aho. That departure from the government led to a schism in True Finns, and the current Finns Party drank precisely from the most radical wing.
Sanna Marin already said in the campaign and on Sunday night that the SDP is willing to try to reach a coalition with the winner Kokoomus, as long as no cuts are made in education, health or social services, and as long as Purra’s party does not participate. . The Finnish press maintains that it seems more feasible for Kookomus to agree with the Finns Party, although other smaller parties would be needed to complete the majority. The Marin government was made up of five parties, and three of them (Left Alliance, Greens and Center Party) have collapsed.
The newspaper with the largest circulation in Finland, the Helsingin Sanomat, noted yesterday that “the electoral victory of the political right has not been a surprise.” The conservative Kokoomus has become the largest party in the country, with ten more seats than it won in the April 2019 elections, and the Finns Party has also won seven more seats. Remember the newspaper that it is usual in Finland for opposition parties to grow in elections.
But even the SDP has grown, with three seats more than those of 2019, which the Finnish press attributes to the useful vote for the social democracy of environmentalist and leftist sympathizers. Result: a bleeding for the Alianza de Izquierdas (7.1%) and Greens (7%) parties, which obtained 7.1% and 7%, respectively. The Center Party (Keskusta), the oldest in the country, which garnered 11.3%, the worst result in its history, was also badly affected.
All of them were part of the outgoing coalition government of Marin -formed by five parties-, and lost from 1.1% (left) to 2.5% (center) through the debacle of the Greens, who saw the 4th vanish .5% of their votes compared to 2019. Only two partners in the outgoing coalition did not suffer losses: the SDP itself and the Swedish People’s Party (liberal-centrist), from the Swedish minority.
