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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.
The controversial outspoken Swedish-speaking Centre party district chairman Peter Albäck has declared (via his blog) that the Swedish Peoples’ Party (Sfp) threatened to quit the government coalition if no proposal for a Swedish-speaking district was included in the court district reform plan (announced about a week ago).
Albäck makes the claim amongst many of his regular denunciations of Sfp (indeed, even to the impartial political observer, his blog seems much more concentrated on forwarding a personal vendetta against Sfp than presenting Centre’s views or policies). Senior Sfp members (including Ulla-Maj Wideroos) have denied that his accusation is true and again expressed dismay that Albäck is threatening the good cooperation between Centre and Sfp at government level.
It is indeed hard not to doubt the trustworthyness of Albäck’s statement, especially given the way he decries any one who does not hold his opinions on his blog (for instance regularly calling people who sympathise with Sfp politics as “taliban”.) If Sfp had threatened to quit, surely they wouldn’t want to keep it secret. For many of their electorate, it would be seen as a good thing; cast-iron proof that Sfp is standing-up for Swedish-speaking Finns. One has to wonder if Albäck’s latest attempted smear on Sfp actually does it more favours than harm.
Image source: Peter Albäck, Centre party’s online image bank. Copyright Suomen keskusta.
