Finland’s probable new conservative prime minister, Petteri Orpo, will this week start exploring coalition options after a narrow election win that shifted the Nordic country’s politics to the right and pushed the party of his predecessor, Sanna Marin, a star of Europe’s left, into third place.
Final results showed Orpo’s National Coalition party (NCP), which campaigned on a platform of reining in public spending, won 48 seats in the 200-seat parliament, with the far-right, anti-immigration Finns party getting 46 and Marin’s Social Democrats (SDP) 43.
In terms of votes, the result was even closer, with the NCP winning 20.6%, the Finns party 20.1% and the SDP 19.9%. The biggest party traditionally gets the first chance to form a government, and since the 1990s has always claimed the prime minister’s office.
“You know what? It was a win,” Orpo told cheering supporters in Helsinki late on Sunday night, adding that the result gave the NCP “a strong mandate” to pursue its key policies of “fixing our economy, boosting growth, and creating new jobs”. The party was “a clear alternative to the leftwing government”, he said.
Marin, who had argued for more spending on education and the health service as key to economic growth and said she would prefer raising taxes to cutting welfare, congratulated the winners and said there were “reasons to be happy” with the vote.
The SDP increased its share of the vote and gained three more seats. However, the NCP increased its number of MPs by 10, while the Finns party, which back spending cuts but campaigned mainly against non-EU immigration, added seven more.
Three members of Marin’s outgoing left-leaning coalition, the once-powerful agrarian Centre party, Greens and Left Alliance, all suffered heavy losses, losing eight, seven and five seats respectively. They are unlikely to want to enter a new coalition.
Orpo, 53 and an MP since 2007, will later this week send a questionnaire to all party leaders asking for their positions on key policy issues before beginning talks with those seen as the most probable partners. He faces a difficult job forming a new government.
He is thought likely to turn first to the Finns, whose leader, Riikka Purra, hailed her party’s “best election result ever”. The far-right party was in government from 2015 to 2017 and its support has surged during a recent sharp rise in the cost of living.
But although the NCP and the Finns party agree on the broad lines of essential spending cuts, they are deeply divided over other key policies. “Both have red lines that will be tough to reconcile,” said Dr Emilia Palonen, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki.
The NCP backs selective, work-based immigration to help fill job vacancies and boost growth. The Finns party vehemently opposes this. Purra’s party also favours leaving the EU as a long-term goal and wants to postpone Finland’s 2035 carbon neutral target.
Those issues could prove insurmountable for many more moderate NCP members, while the refusal of several smaller parties to enter a coalition with the far-right party further limits Orpo’s options for a so-called “blue-black” rightwing coalition.
“Heavy election losses and well-known policy differences mean Orpo could start running out of parties willing to enter government,” Markku Jokisipilä, an assistant professor and director of the University of Turku’s Centre for Parliamentary Studies, told the public broadcaster Yle.
The Finns party, too, may think twice about joining a government coalition if it means abandoning some of its key election pledges. “They cannot stick to their climate line if they want to be in government,” the tabloid Iltalehti said in its post-election analysis.
“It is clear that if a right-leaning coalition is achieved, there will be some very disappointed people among Finns party voters,” the paper said. “Not all their election promises will be able to be redeemed.”
Orpo’s other potential option, a broad cross-spectrum coalition with the SDP, looks equally fraught given the parties’ very public disagreements over Finland’s spiralling public debt, welfare spending and the need for budget cuts.
“The SDP has been the ruling party, and of course, it will want to join the government – but only if the new programme can be made tolerable from its point of view,” Iltalehti said. “It’s not impossible, but the Social Democrats will have to eat humble pie.”
Marin, now 37, was the world’s youngest prime minister at the time she took over from the previous SDP leader in 2019, polling as the country’s most popular politician – and, abroad, a role model for a new generation of young female leaders.
She was credited with leading Finland through the Covid-19 pandemic, taking a hard line against the country’s eastern neighbour Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and bringing the traditionally non-aligned Nordic country to within days of joining Nato.
Support for Ukraine in Finland - which shares a 1,300km (805-mile) border with Russia – is almost universal, and Orpo made a point on Sunday night of saying Helsinki would continue to stand by Kyiv during his tenure. The Finns, too, have stressed the importance of sovereignty, solidarity and support for Ukraine.
Marin retained the personal support of many voters despite critics claiming she had behaved irresponsibly and inappropriately for a prime minister after she was filmed dancing and singing with friends at a party last summer.
Ultimately, however, public concern about Finland’s borrowing – its ratio of debt to gross domestic product has risen from 66% to 73% as it seeks to recover from the pandemic – and government spending meant opposition messaging on the economy proved successful. Purro gained more personal votes than Marin on Sunday.
Finland’s swing to the right, and the campaign’s focus on the economy, echoes a similar shift in neighbouring Sweden last year. The cost of living is also expected to be a key issue among voters in Spanish and Polish elections later this year.
“There seems to be no more demand for the policies offered by Sanna Marin’s government,” said Yle’s political editor, Maria Stenroos. “Whichever option Orpi now chooses, the government’s direction will change – to the right.”
