Finland’s right-wing opposition won yesterday’s election by beating Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s social democracy, according to nightly broadcasts by public radio and television Yle, which were in line with the partial scrutiny of early voting. So, the conservative National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), led by Petteri Orpo, would get 20.9% of the vote, followed by the far-right Finns Party (formerly called Veritables Finnesos) with 20.3%, and social democrat SDP of Sanna Marin, with 19.7%.
Marin conceded the victory of Kokoomus last night, when the counting was not yet over, and congratulated its leader, Petteri Orpo, with whom she said she was ready to form a governing coalition, if portend difficult negotiations.
The candidate of the party with the most votes becomes prime minister as long as he manages to gather a parliamentary majority, and all indications are that the conservative Petteri Orpo, 53, will assume this role. Negotiations to forge a governing coalition usually last weeks, even months.
During the campaign, Orpo did not rule out forming a government with the Party of Finns, which has been chaired by Riikka Purra, 45, for ten years, something that Sanna Marin, 37, has always rejected out of hand.
About 4.5 million voters – the total population is 5.5 million – were called to the polls in the 13 constituencies of the Nordic country to elect the 200 deputies of the next Eduskunta, the unicameral Parliament of Finland. More than 1.7 million voters, equivalent to 40.5% of the electoral roll, cast an early vote – in person, in libraries, supermarkets and other premises – between March 22 and 28 using a system implemented in 1970 to encourage participation.
Sanna Marin, the world’s youngest head of government when she came to power at the age of 34 at the end of 2019, had won recognition for her good management of the coronavirus pandemic and for piloting Finland’s accession process NATO – which will probably materialize this week – as well as for his forceful statements about the aggression of neighboring Russia in Ukraine.
But the electoral campaign has gravitated around the economy and, above all, the public debt. Inflation has shot up to 8% and the highest energy price in the general context resulting from the war in Ukraine has been added to the entry of the Finnish economy into a technical recession.
In this context, the SDP’s proposal to continue investing in education, employment and social welfare policies, and to balance public spending with increased capital and inheritance taxes has not managed to convince the bulk of the electorate.
The conservative Orpo says, instead, that Finland should cut spending on unemployment benefits and other social assistance programs to prevent public debt from rising. The far-right Purra also preaches austerity, in addition to the usual anti-immigration speech of this party.
Despite coming third, the SDP improved the results of the April 2019 elections, in which it obtained 17.7%. In that meeting, the conservatives got 17%, and the far-right, 17.5%, so all three parties have grown in votes.
In the elections of April 2019, Sanna Marin was not presented as head of the list, but her co-religionist and predecessor, Antti Rinne, who resigned after a few months due to his management of a salary dispute in postal service Marin was Minister of Transport and Communications, and replaced him at the head of the Executive. In August 2020, the SDP elected her party president, of which she was already vice president. These elections were, therefore, the first that Marin faced as head of the list, and they have been at the same time an evaluation of his work as a government.
