Thread by @minna_alander

And here we go: foreign journalists are deeply confused “how could Finland’s most celebrated politician Sanna Marin lose the election ??”

Well, she’s a case of a politician who is more popular abroad than domestically.

Although Germany’s Scholz is passionately hated abroad, chances are that his domestic approval ratings have been sometimes higher than Marin’s.

Marin’s government had solid approval ratings at around 60% throughout though, but still people voted for the opposition parties.

The constellation going into the elections was interesting: Marin was personally more popular than her party (social democrats), while the opposition leader Petteri Orpo was personally less popular than his party (National Coalition Party that won the elections).

It seems that part of the big losses of the smaller Green Party and Left Alliance were due to tactical voting among the centre-left voters who wanted to prevent the Finns Party (that came in second before the social democrats) winning the elections and getting the PM post

You’d expect Marin at least to have gotten the highest number of personal votes but wrong again: Riikka Purra, leader of the Finns Party, surpassed her (Marin got 35 623, Purra 42 589 which is the 4th highest result in Finnish history)

As has been pointed out here, it’s almost a rule that a sitting PM loses the elections in Finland. So the fact that Marin’s social democrats gained seats (even if it was due to tactical voting) is quite the win.

https://twitter.com/pellipetja/status/1642806890928250880

And one more important thing: Marin is well known abroad for Finland’s NATO process and support for Ukraine. But both are consensus issues in Finland and neither was an election topic because there are simply no relevant political divisions on NATO or Ukraine.

Also, never underestimate how riled up Finns can get about public debt. Finland’s public debt has been growing consistently since the financial crisis and there was a new covid-induced peak during Marin’s time in office.

treasuryfinland.fi/central-govern…

P.S. Finland is in NATO and I am out of office. You can file complaints in the comments but I will take my liberty to ignore them (yes, “Scholz is unpopular” would have been better than “passionately hated”). These are also just my observations as a Finnish citizen, not as expert