the conservative Petteri Orpo, with government experience since he was in charge of three ministries, will in all probability be in charge of carrying out the change that the ballot boxes demanded in Finland. His party, Alianza Nacional or ‘Kokoomus’, surpassed by the minimum the extreme right and by a slightly less fragile margin to the social democracy of Prime Minister Sanna Marin. Orpo thus returned the moderate right to the position of first force. A victory that comes four years after being defeated as a candidate and seeing himself demoted to third position, after the social democrats and radicals.
The advantage for ‘Kokoomus’ in the Parliamentary election Finns on Sunday about the True Finns, the extreme right who captained Rika Purra, was minimal: 20.8% versus 20.1%, respectively. But behind that slight difference was the moral triumph of Orpo, who achieved an increase of ten points for his own compared to the 2019 elections. His party will have 48 seats in the new Parliament (Eduskunta), two more than the radical right . Marin’s social democracy was left at 19.9% and 43 positions -after more than it had-.
Finnish practice gives Orpo the first option to lead a government alliance. The experienced politician looked euphoric on election night. “The Finns want change. We will lead it ”, he declared before the foreign media from a building adjacent to Parliament, a place where the political leaders They continue the election night together, before moving to the electoral party (or the crying party) organized by each party.
NATO support
The questions from foreign journalists went directly to what, from abroad at least, has been the dominant issue – NATO membership, which Finland has achieved in just ten months. Orpo settled it with “we always bet on joining the Alliance.” The important thing is the economy, he insisted.
The debate around the Atlantic Alliance it had been recurring in Finnish politics for a few decades. The right tended to yes; the social democrats they did not join them until the invasion of Russia about Ukraine triggered the fears of a country with 1,340 kilometers of shared border with the aggressor country.
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Aged 53 -16 more than Marin and 8 more than Purra-, born in Köyliö, a small town about 200 kilometers northwest of Helsinki, and a graduate in Political Science, Orpo’s paradigm is cutting the public spending. From the pandemic and under Marin’s center-left coalition, indebtedness climbed to 75%. Finland entered recession. Orpo proposes to apply austerity. The same recipe that cost him the electoral collapse four years ago. Reality prevails, he affirms.
Orpo had been Minister of Agriculture for a year, between 2014 and 2015, under the government led by the conservative, Alexander Stubb. By then he had already been a deputy for seven years. He held the Ministry of the Interior after the 2015 legislative elections, in which his party opted for right-wing radicalism as a partner. A year later he became the leader of ‘Kokoomus’; he later he assumed the Ministry of Finance.
In his successive statements on election night, he insisted on his intention to open negotiations with all parties. Theoretically it should start with the Purra radicals. But in Finland Orpo is remembered not only for the slogan of austerity, but also as the engine of the expulsion of the True Finns from the tripartite led by another centrist, Juha Sipilä. That happened in 2017 and at that time the extreme right was led by the arsonist Jussi Halla-aho. Orpo considered that his partner had entered into a radical dynamic unsustainable for the tripartite.
Purra, successor to Halla-aho, has ironed out rough edges in her party, despite staying in line with the euroescepticismo and defend the cuts to the immigration.
From the passage of Orpo through Finance, the harsh cuts in social benefits, which would make an election as the second partner of the Marin Social Democrats difficult. The outgoing prime minister does not reject an eventual coalition with ‘Kokoomus’. But she has conditioned this formula on the fact that there is no social cutsin education or research.
Neither Marin nor Purra had been measured at the polls in a national election. There, too, Orpo surpassed them in experience. The legislative elections on Sunday were his second electoral battle after the defeat in 2019.
Whatever your choice is now, it will require a multi-party negotiation. Neither Purra’s 46 seats nor Marin’s 43 will be enough to obtain the stable majority he seeks. He will have to win over other allies, which in politically fragmented Finland is something of a bazaar, in which both the centrists and the Swedish minority party play.