HELSINKI: Finland’s opposition conservative party retained its majority in the country’s municipalities following local elections in which the far-right made large gains but fell short of pollsters’ expectations.
With 100% of ballots counted from Sunday’s vote, the centre-right National Coalition Party was the largest winner with 21.4% of the ballots across Finland’s 300-odd local councils, a small gain on four years ago.
Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s Social Democrats placed second, over three percentage points behind, in her first test at the polls since coming to power in December 2019, and following a campaign dominated by how to manage the economic fallout from the pandemic.
Despite a “disappointing” fall of 1.6% in 2017, Marin managed to defy predictions that her party could fall to third or even fourth place in the Nordic nation’s town halls.
“Clearly, when your support goes down then as party leader you can never be satisfied,“ she told public broadcaster Yle.
“We’ll certainly be analysing the election result very closely.”
The nationalist Finns Party, which ran on a hardline anti-immigration and anti-EU ticket, came in as the fourth largest party with 14.5%, narrowly behind the Centre Party.
That marks an almost 6% improvement for the populists on the last local election in 2017 — the largest gain of any party on Sunday.
“Our aim was to improve on our last (local) election result and get our best result in history, which we did,“ party leader Jussi Halla-aho told newspaper Iltalehti.
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But the Finns Party fell short of their 17.5% vote share in the 2019 general election, and also failed to live up to pollsters’ forecasts that they could become the largest or second largest party in local government.
Nonetheless Halla-aho, standing for mayor in the capital Helsinki, garnered over 18,500 personal votes, the largest haul of any candidate even if his party did not win enough votes in the city to snatch the mayoralty from the conservatives.
A Finns Party poster in Helsinki which said that foreigners are jumping the social housing queue was removed by the regulator for breaching advertising guidelines, generating in the process significant media coverage.
Halla-aho’s personal vote also far outstripped Prime Minister Marin who stood as a councillor in the southern town of Tampere and won just over 10,000 ballots.
Marin has however enjoyed relatively high levels of support, having been credited with helping Finland maintain some of Europe’s lowest levels of coronavirus infection.
Sunday’s election was postponed from April due to the pandemic, and despite efforts to make voting Covid-safe, with outdoor, drive-in polling stations during an extended advanced voting period, turnout on Sunday was 55.1% compared to 58.9% in 2017. — AFP
