The first round to elect the new president of the country will be held on Sunday in Finland, an important figure because he holds various powers in foreign and security policy, unlike what happens for example in Italy, in which the President of the Republic has a role mostly more ceremonial. The new Finnish president will certainly be different from the outgoing one, given that the conservative Sauli Niinisto, who has reached the end of his second mandate, by law can no longer run again. Voting takes place from 9am local time (8am Italian time) to 8pm, although it is assumed that around half of the votes have already been cast through the early voting by post which took place from 17 to 23 January, as also happened in the presidential elections of 2018. The results should arrive by midnight on Sunday and will be made official on January 30th.
Nine candidates presented themselves but it is expected that none will be able to get more than 50 percent of the votes: if this were to happen, there will be a run-off between the two most voted candidates on 11 February. At the moment the favorites are the former prime minister Alexander Stubb, of the centre-right National Coalition Party (it is the same party as Niinisto and the current prime minister Petteri Orpo); and former Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, of the Green Party, who is running for the third time. Polls say Stubb is ahead and both could take 21 to 27 percent of the vote.
These elections come at a very particular moment in Finland’s history. These are the first presidential 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 the Soviet Union which had maintained for over seventy years. The position of neutrality had been held for so long also for geographical reasons, given that Finland shares a border more than 1300 kilometers long with Russia. However, the Finnish government changed its mind in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine: the decision was approved by Niinisto and strongly supported by the population.
Relations between the two countries had recently become even more tense. In November, Finland closed all border crossings with Russia because it believed the Russian government was trying to destabilize the country by directing large numbers of migrants to the Finnish border. Russia had denied the accusations, in mid-December two gates were reopened, but they were closed again after 2 days due to continuo flow of migrants.
Foreign policy and the relationship between Russia and Finland were 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. In recent years, President Niinisto’s work had focused on countries outside the European Union, such as Russia, the United States and China, leaving European affairs to the prime minister in office. The importance of the role has even grown, as the president represents Finland at NATO meetings. He is also head of the army and decides the main military appointments.
Televised debates between the candidates and national newspapers therefore focused on Finland’s new role as a member of NATO, the effects of Russia’s proximity on its security policy and the war in Ukraine, of which Finland is one of Europe’s main suppliers of military and humanitarian aid. 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: What it means to be part of NATO
The favorite candidate at the moment is the Conservative Alexander Stubb, first in the polls with 24 percent. Stubb has held official positions in politics since 2004, when he was elected to the European Parliament. He then became Foreign Minister and Prime Minister, in 2017 he left Finnish politics and became Vice President of the European Investment Bank. Since 2020 he has been director of the Florence School of Transnational Governance, part of the European University Institute, a university funded by the European Union based in Florence. Stubb said during the election campaign that his idea of leaving politics forever changed seven years ago after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the polls Stubb is followed by Pekka Haavisto, of the Greens. Haavisto was ahead in the polls until November, but now he is around 21 percent. He had already run for president in 2012 and 2018, coming second behind Niinisto in both cases, and if he were elected he would be the first openly gay president in Finnish history. During his term as foreign minister, from 2019 to 2023, he worked closely with Niinisto on the country’s accession to NATO and in his career he was also a diplomat for the United Nations and the European Union.
In third place with 15 percent in the polls and popular especially among young people is Jussi Halla-aho, former leader of the far-right populist Finns party and now speaker of parliament. Unlike the other two pro-European candidates, Halla-aho is very critical of the Union, especially its migration policies. In 2012 he was fined by the Supreme Court of Finland for racist comments.
Halla-aho is followed by centrist Olli Rehn, current governor of the Central Bank of Finland and former European commissioner, and Jutta Urpilainen, president of the Social Democratic Party (the party of former prime minister Sanna Marin).
During the Haavisto (Greens) election campaign he tried to exploit to his advantage the fact that Stubb’s party is currently governing together with Halla-aho’s: the government, defined as the most right-wing in the history of Finland, was born after the victory of the centre-right in the parliamentary elections in April 2023 and has since been involved in several scandals. At the end of June, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Vilhelm Junnila, resigned after receiving much criticism for a joke about Nazism made in 2019 during an event organized by neo-Nazis; in July the new Minister of the Interior, Mari Rantanen, he had to deny to believe in the conspiracy theory of ethnic replacement, as some of his tweets seemed to suggest.
For now, however, Haavisto’s tactic to try to weaken Stubb by showing him as too close to the far right has proven ineffective, also because on the other hand Stubb is extremely pro-European and liberal: for example, he has said several times that he wants to expel Fidesz, the party of Hungarian president Viktor Orbàn, from the European People’s Party, precisely because of its eurosceptic and illiberal positions.
– Read also: In Finland the far right is becoming a problem for the government