Despite today being the election we don't yet have a new president. In the Finnish election system one of the candidates has to get more than 50 % of the votes, and if that doesn't happen on the first election day, there will be another round in two weeks, and that will be between the two most popular candidates. So the second election will be on February 5! And again, I have to vote in advance, so I'll be heading to the embassy in Dublin next Friday.
There were eight candidates, one from each of the parliament parties. As expected, the candidate who got the most votes was Sauli Niinistö from the National Coalition party (centre-right, liberal conservative). His percentage of the votes was 37,0 %.
The battle for the second place was tight between Paavo Väyrynen from the Centre Party and Pekka Haavisto from the Green League. In the end, Haavisto got 18,8 % of the votes and Väyrynen lost with 17,5 %!
For thirty years in a row Finland has had a president with a social-democrat background. The current president, Tarja Halonen, was Finland's first female president and has been in office for the past 12 years. If Niinistö wins the election, he will be the first Coalition-president since 1956. If Haavisto wins, not only will he be the first Green president, but also the first openly homosexual president. He is in a registered relationship/civil union with an ecuadorian hair-dresser!
So it's a historical election in that sense.
The president doesn't really have much power, though. The real leader of the country is the Prime Minister (at the moment: Jyrki Katainen, National Coalition Party) and the president doesn't have any say in legislation or any of that. The president represents Finland abroad in different summits and meeting etc. The president is also nominally the supreme commander of the Finnish army! :D But luckily we're not in war. And if we were, I'd say the president wouldn't be the one making the strategical moves...
By the way, if you weren't able to tell by the names, all of the above-mentioned people are men, except Tarja Halonen. There were two female candidates in this election, one from the Christian Democrats and one from the Swedish People's Party of Finland, but they got the least amount of votes out of the bunch.
What else should I mention? Oh, the president's term is six years long. That's one reason why I go through the trouble of going all the way to Dublin to vote, because this is my first presidential election I can vote in, and there won't be another one in six years! The parliament election is every four years, the last one was last spring and that was my first one too! The previous one was in 2007, but it was a few months before I turned 18. Yeah, I guess another thing to mention is that the voting age in Finland is 18, but that is not very surprising in any way!
Random facts:
- It took about 2 hours to count the votes after the ballot boxes closed
- 72,7 % of the citizens with a right to vote, voted in this election; that means 3 059 850 people out of a possible 4 407 185
- In every election Donald Duck and his Disney friends receive a small percentage of votes
- There are only about 80 foreign reporters in Finland following the election, which indicates that the interest abroad isn't very great. The reporters say that the strange language also makes it a little bit hard to follow!
So that's my little news flash on the elections, just to keep all my readers (all three of them) up to date on Finnish current events. Other than that, I don't really have a lot of news. Tomorrow starts the third week of the semester and I'm not completely burnt-out yet, which is nice! Anyway, I will write more soon. Bye!
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