Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, was facing a battle to hold on to power on Sunday with the country’s conservative opposition National Coalition party (NCP) holding a narrow early lead in a knife-edge general election.
Among the 40% of voters who cast their ballots before election day, the NCP garnered a score of 20.8%, fractionally ahead of Marin’s centre-left Social Democrats (SDP) on 20.7%. The far-right nationalist Finns party scored 18.6%.
The early vote tally is often skewed, however, and analysts warned against reading too much into the partial results as counting continued. Marin said after seeing the early results she was confident her party would win a big share of election-day votes.
The party winning the vote will have the first shot at forming a coalition, but talks are set to be long and tortuous, with polls in the election run-up showing the three main parties in an almost dead heat and reliant on smaller parties to form a coalition.
Marin, 37, became the world’s youngest prime minister when she assumed the leadership of the SDP – and the Finnish premiership – in 2019 and has successfully led the country through the Covid pandemic and to the brink of Nato membership.
Her determination to enjoy a social life has also made headlines, with fans hailing her as a rising star of the centre-left and model for a new generation of young female leaders. Critics argue that her behaviour has at times been inappropriate for her office.
She was forced to apologise and took a drug test last year, but also defended her right to party, after photos and video emerged of her drinking and dancing with friends.
Marin remains more popular than her party and rival political leaders, with an opinion poll for the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper in December finding 64% of respondents felt she had done a “very” or “fairly” good job as prime minister.
But with recession forecast and inflation surging, opposition leaders’ accusations of excessive government borrowing and inflated public spending – along with their pledges to impose tough cuts, particularly on welfare budgets – have proved effective.
The NCP’s Petteri Orpo has promised to slash spending on unemployment and housing benefits. “The most important thing in the next government is to fix our economy and push economic growth,” he said during campaigning.
Riikka Purra of the Finns – who were part of a coalition government from 2015 to 2017 – says their priority is to cut non-EU immigration, promising also to focus on climate, crime and energy policies if it is part of the new coalition.
Whoever emerges as the winner, coalition negotiations are set to be tough, with the SDP and two of its current five-party coalition, the Greens and the Left Alliance, all ruling out any alliance with with the Finns, which Marin has called “openly racist”.
Of the two others, the Swedish People’s party, a moderate party representing Swedish-speaking Finns, has said it is “very unlikely” to partner with the far-right Finns.
The once-powerful agrarian Centre party, on the other hand, whose vote has plunged in recent years, will not join any coalition resembling the current one. The NCP has not excluded any combination, saying it will wait to see the results.
If the NCP finishes first, it could try to put together a right-leaning “blue-black” coalition with the Finns, or pursue a broad “blue-red” alliance with the SDP, an outcome many analysts see as most likely despite obvious policy differences.
As many as 10 parties could win seats in the 200-seat parliament. The outcome should be clear by midnight.
