In Finland the first round of the presidential elections was won by former prime minister Alexander Stubb, of the centre-right National Coalition Party: according to preliminary results, Stubb obtained the 27.2 percent of votes and on February 11th he will go to a run-off with the second most voted candidate, the former Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, of the Green party, who obtained 25.8 percent of the votes. In Finland, voting took place on Sunday to elect the country’s new president, an important figure because he holds various powers in foreign and security policy. The run-off was foreseen in the event that no candidate, as expected, had obtained more than 50 percent of the votes: Stubb was still considered the favourite.
Sunday’s elections were the first elections after the country joined NATO in April 2023, the military alliance that includes the United States and most European countries, abandoning the position of neutrality between the Western bloc and that of ‘Soviet Union which he had maintained for over seventy years. Foreign policy and the relationship between Russia and Finland were precisely at the center of the electoral campaign of these presidential elections, also due to the active role that the president of Finland plays in the country’s politics. However, these issues were addressed more for their general importance than for the presence of conflicting positions, as all the main candidates said they intended to take a hard line against Russia.
– Read also: Finland’s first elections as a member of NATO