Remember I mentioned the “True Finns” party in passing last week? The election is this weekend and it looks like a four-way race:
Finland votes on Sunday in its most closely watched general election in years, with the campaign hijacked by a Eurosceptic maverick riding roughshod over the consensus that has long characterised the country’s politics.
Timo Soini has alarmed the European and Finnish elites by leading his True Finns party into a neck-and-neck position with the three mainstream parties that traditionally dominate Finnish politics.
The quadrupling of support for the True Finns since the last election in 2007 puts Finland firmly in line with the cardinal trend in politics across Europe in the past year — the emergence of the populist far right combining nostalgia for disappearing values and traditions with anti-immigrant and anti-EU appeal.
An opinion poll on Friday put the True Finns at around 16% in a coalition system, soaring from 4% in 2007 albeit sliding a little from their position in surveys last week. That put True Finns neck and neck with the Centre party of the prime minister, Mari Kiviniemi, and the opposition social democrats, and a few points behind the poll leaders, the National Coalition party led by the finance minister, Jyrki Katainen.
Here’s the riding of Whitby-Oshawa in the 2008 election. Notice all that deep blue colour? As the legend says, the opacity of colour indicates the strength of the party in that area. Up in the Brooklin area, you can barely see the underlying road pattern for all the blueness.
