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Today is the voting day for municipal elections. Polls are open until 20.00. If you haven’t voted in advance, this is your chance to have your say – but you’ll need to do it at the specific voting station named on your voting card. Results will come out from 20.00. It will be interesting to see if the Centre party’s performance will be poor. The Social Democrats are also going to their first election since their new leader Jutta Urpilainen took office in the summer; what reaction will the party-base make if, as tipped, they also perform badly? According to opinion polls, it’s the National Coalition Kokoomus party who should be looking forward to making the best progress.
In Swedish-speaking Finland, will the Swedish Peoples’ Party SFP manage to hold its ground; in the south, it’s faced with the challenge of demographics: as more Finnish speakers arrive, the proportion of Swedish speakers (and thus likely SFP voters) falls. How will they do in the newly merged municipalities, such as Svenskfinland’s soon to be largest town Raseborg which for the first time will go to the polls united in preparation for the 1 January merger. Will the new Swedish-speaking district of the Centre party led by the highly controversial Peter Albäck succeed in gaining ground anywhere outside his own home municipality of Kronoby? And, will the right-wing populist anti-Swedish True Finns party perform well enough to end up with a higher share of the national vote than the SFP and thus risk taking the only Swedish-speaking seat on the board of the National Association of Municipalities?
More analysis to follow after the results are known!
And, yes, Svenskfinland in English is back in business after a quiet patch (due to generally high work levels and also a 2 week holiday in the sun). Apologies if you’ve e-mailed lately and I haven’t got back to you – I shall do so soon.
Image: Ministry of Justice. Election results for all municipalities will be published as they come in on the Justice Ministry’s elections website.
Greens in Sibbo (Sipoo) will fight this autumn’s municipal election as an independent association according to a report from Radio Vega Östnyland. Most Green activists in Sibbo have cut their link to the national party because of the Greens’ government ministers stance on the annexation of south west Sibbo by Helsinki. When the matter came up in the government, the Green’s ministers supported Helsinki’s forced take-over of an area of south west Sibbo. This was passed in government by a vote of 8-4. The annexation will occur on 1 January 2009. Previously, around 95% of Sibbo’s electorate had voted against the proposal in a referendum organised by the municipal council. The decisions by both the government and later the high court of administration in favour of Helsinki have been seen by many as an attack against municipal democracy and as a victory of the large over the small. In many letters to newspapers, the annexation has been likened to rape.
After the decision, the Greens lost many members in Sibbo who resigned in protest. The same fate also affected Kokoomus (who are the second largest party in Sibbo’s local council), whose government ministers also all supported Helsinki’s forced annexation. The Greens now face a tough municipal election in Sibbo, with 3 of their 4 councillors stating they will not stand for reelection.
Currently, the Swedish peoples party (Sfp) has 20 mandates in Sibbo. The national coalition party Kokoomus have 10. SDP hold 6, the Greens currently have 4 and Centre has 3 councillors.
The image is from one of the several protests against Helsinki’s forced annexation of south west Sibbo that occurred during 2007.
The Swedish Peoples’ Party (Sfp) has set a goal of increasing its number of votes by at least one thousand in the autumn’s municipal elections (when compared to those of 4 years ago).
Sfp is hoping it can offer 1 500 candidates of which half should be women and with an increased number of young people and recent immigrants to Finland than in its previous election campaigns.
According to party chairman Stefan Wallin, this year’s election will be particularly challenging for Sfp as many municipalities are merging creating an unpredictable and new dynamic in many localities.
Some municipalities that are merging with Finnish language dominated neighbours will present a particular challenge for Sfp with the number of Swedish speakers decreasing as a proportion. It will be vital for Sfp to mobilise its electorate to enable Swedish speakers to maintain their representation in municipal councils and governments at the same level.
Sfp has announced that its election theme will be fairness and equality. According to Sfp, individuals must have the right to be treated equally and fairly by all authorities regardless of their background or linguistic group. Municipalities should also be treated fairly by the state, which appears to be a clear reference to the Sibbo drama where the views of Sibbo’s inhabitants were overridden by Helsinki and the central government.
UPDATE Wednesday 16.27
It seems the association for Fair Trade which also uses the term Fairness in its campaigning is unhappy with Sfp’s usage of the same term.
Sfp has designed a campaign logo, a Fairness label/stamp design. Party secretary Ulla Achrén said that Sfp would be a party of fairness, with candidates standing for fairness and for policies of fairness.
Janne Sivonen who is the communications director at Association of the Advancement of Fair Trade in Finland was disappointed at this news, he told Svensk presstjänst: “This is certainly to mislead consumers. The ‘Fair Trade mark’ is a registered trademark in Europe and a guarantee that a product meets international fair trade criteria. Sfp has not asked us for permission to use the slogan. We will be discussing this matter with them.”
Finland’s Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (centre party) has ruled himself out of the 2012 presidential election already. Vanhanen told the newspaper Itä-Savo that he doesn’t want to be president and had already experienced one presidential election (the last one in 2006 where he ran and was eliminated in the first round after coming in third place with 18,6% of the vote). Vanhanen did however state that he was aiming for a third term as prime minister.
This leaves potentially both Centre and the Social Democrats without obvious candidates for the 2012 elections, although it is obviously still a long way off and the SDP will get a new chairman this summer.
Their main rivals, the National Coalition party Kokoomus do however have one obvious candidate, Sauli Niinistö. Niinistö came second in 2006 with 48,2% of the vote in the second round against Tarja Halonen. This was a respectable result considering highly popular Halonen got 49,4% in the first round and before that took place, people were tipping the election to be already settled in one round. Since then, Niinistö has been elected to the Finnish parliament in 2007’s election, getting the most personal votes ever in a parliamentary election, and become speaker of parliament. He’s seen to be popular and easily the favourite right now to become Kokoomus’ first president since Paasikivi who left office in 1956. Still, if a week is a long time in politics, 4 years is surely an eternity.
This past weekend, the current SDP (Social Democratic Party) chairman Eero Heinäluoma startled his party by announcing that he would not be standing for reelection as his party’s chairman this summer.
Now, the SDP didn’t do well at the last parliamentary election, ending up out of government in third behind the centre-right National Coaltion party and the Centre party. Heinäluoma has said he takes the responsibility for this. Some also say Heinäluoma and the wider SDP have not used golden opportunities such as the recent TEHY nurses wage conflict and current discussions around the state’s company ownership policies to put forward their opposition to the current government’s policies. To put it bluntly, SDP’s profile needs to be raised.
But who to do this? Could it be the SDP’s first woman leader or will the old veteran Erkki Tuomioja finally get his dream job. Yle rung round SDP board members, and it turns out their favourites are Tarja Filatov and Tuomioja. With politics as they are now – all the more image driven, could it be a good move for the SDP to use the chance to renew their image and put a younger leader in. With Filatov, they could perhaps strike that cord. Sadly, 2008 might just be too late for the veteran Tuomioja to finally make it. It would be hard for him to freshen up the party’s image.
