Juanjo Galan |
Helsinki (EFE)
At the end of the scrutiny, the conservative formation led by Petteri Orpo, until now the third political force in the Nordic country, obtained 20.8% of the votes and 48 of the 200 seats in the Eduskunta (Parliament), ten more than in the previous elections. elections.
A significant advance that once again places the conservatives as the largest party in Finland after twelve years and that will allow Orpo to lead the negotiations to form the next coalition Executive that must replace the one led until now by the Prime Minister, the Social Democrat Sanna Marin.
Meanwhile, the far-right True Finns, led by the head of the opposition, Riikka Purra, garnered 20.1% of the votes and 46 seats, seven more than in the last elections, after increasing its popular support by 2.6%.
“The Finnish people want a change and now I will open negotiations with all the parties to form a government,” an exultant Orpo told the press before even finishing the count.
Insufficient SDP progress
Marin’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) finally had to settle for third place, winning 43 seats, despite bettering its own results and falling just two tenths behind the far-right.
The SDP, until now the main party in the country, won three more seats and 2.2% more votes, an insufficient advance but which gives it the right to be considered as a possible partner in the next government coalition.
“My party has gained support and we have more representatives in Parliament, so as party leader I am very happy,” said Marin, who was running for the first time as her party’s leader in parliamentary elections.
Marin predicted difficult negotiations to form a government, although he expressed his confidence that an agreement would be reached that would guarantee a coalition with a parliamentary majority.
Marin herself advanced during the campaign that she would have no problem governing with the conservatives as long as cuts in education, health and social services are not applied, although she sees it as almost impossible to reach agreements with the True Finns.
The conservative leader, for his part, said he wants to negotiate with all parties, regardless of their ideology, because his intention is to create “a government with a solid majority.”
“There is a crucial issue and that is the economy. We have to fix our economy, we have to make reforms to drive it towards sustainable growth,” said Orpo.
In Finland “there is no extreme right”
Asked by the foreign press if he would be willing to form a government with the extreme right, the conservative leader limited himself to saying that “in Finland there are no extreme right parties.”
A strange statement, since Orpo himself, in his time as Finance Minister, agreed in 2017 with the then prime minister, the centrist Juha Sipilä, to expel the True Finns from the government coalition due to the turn to the extreme right that this formation gave with the election as president of Jussi Halla-aho, representative of the most radical wing.
Kokoomus’s conservatives and Riikka Purra’s party share similar visions on certain issues, mainly economics, but they maintain big differences on issues such as immigration and European and environmental policies.
Sanna Marin’s SDP was, together with the minority Swedish People’s Party, the only one of the five partners in the current government coalition that did not lose popular support.
During the campaign, the prime minister framed the elections as a clash of values between the left and the right, implying that the only way to avoid a victory for the extreme right was to vote for the SDP.
The tactic of appealing to the useful vote, aimed above all at the undecided, caught on with a part of the traditional voters of Los Verdes and the Alianza de Izquierdas, who this time voted for the Social Democrats to curb the right.
As a result, the Greens, in which the Foreign Minister, Pekka Haavisto, is a member, lost 7 of their 20 seats and the leftist formation 5 of their 16, so they will hardly be able to aspire to be taken into account for the next government coalition.
However, the big loser of the day was the Center Party, one of the most traditional political forces in the country, which lost 8 of its 31 deputies after reaping 11.3%, the worst result in its history.