The favourite and the challenger line up

Although the second round of Finland’s presidential election seems like a done deal, the race between President Tarja Halonen and Sauli Niinistö, former leader of the National Coalition Party, will be exciting and may turn out to be a close call, writes Kyösti Karvonen, managing editor of the newspaper Kaleva.

The roles are clear in the second round of Finland’s presidential election, which takes place on January 29. The incumbent, the left-wing candidate and overwhelming winner in the first round, President Tarja Halonen, is the favourite, while the runner-up, the non-Socialist candidate Sauli Niinistö, is the challenger.

Regardless of this setup, the second round will be exciting and closer than the results of the first round might indicate. For the first time in many years, we have a situation where left-wing and right-wing parties have unequivocally closed ranks behind their respective candidates. But what blurs the issue is that a presidential election is more about personalities than policies.
A Social Democrat candidate has won every presidential election in Finland since the end of the 25-year presidency of Urho Kekkonen in 1981. Indeed, the Social Democratic Party has now held the presidency for almost as long as Kekkonen did. Yet the left-wing parties combined only hold one third of the seats in Parliament. If Niinistö were to win, he would be the first president to emerge from the moderate right-wing National Coalition party since J.K. Paasikivi, whose term ended in 1956.

The duel will be won by whoever does better in the TV debates to be aired over two weeks of campaigning and is the more successful in attracting the supporters of the other candidates who dropped out after the first round. The key voter groups are the supporters of the Centre Party, which is the main Government party and was also the biggest loser in the first round; women voters; and possibly young people. Voter turnout will also be an important factor.

Because the political left was behind Halonen from the outset, there is no problem mustering the troops for the second round. The largest unknown factor in the second round is how well, or otherwise, the non-Socialist parties manage to drum up support for Niinistö. Because the presidential election is primarily about personalities, it is difficult to steer voters with political recommendations. The leaders of non-Socialist parties, other than the National Coalition, declared their support for Niinistö, but none of them took a formal decision to endorse him.

The last time a non-Socialist coalition was tried in a presidential election was six years ago, but at that time the National Coalition did not pitch its open support behind the Centre Party’s candidate, Esko Aho, who reached the second round but then lost. The National Coalition did not support Aho because the party had had a humiliating experience in the coalition Government led by then Prime Minister Aho, in the 1990s.

Halonen’s plunging ratings

Halonen, the candidate endorsed by the Social Democrats, the Left Alliance (heir to the Communists) and the major trade union organization, the SAK, was in a strong position to make history by winning outright in the first round with over 50% of the direct popular vote. That would have been a unique achievement in Finland’s history.

This failed to happen, as Halonen’s ratings took a downward turn at the crucial moment, during the last week of campaigning. This was a surprise since the final polls conducted just before that week showed Halonen's rating still clearly above 50%, which she had sustained for longer than any other candidate in the course of a campaign. But the high performance did not last.

Analyses of the first-round results suggested that an outright win eluded Halonen because of miscalculations in her campaign and her TV appearances, which were only moderately successful at best. But as the polls looked good, Halonen declared that she was going for a win in the first round. Her campaign pronouncements even went to the extent of urging people to vote for her in order to save taxpayers' money.

The first round demonstrated, yet again, that polls and actual election results can differ widely from one another. Apart from the faux pas in Halonen’s campaign, some voters who had supported her in opinion polls ultimately voted for the candidate of the party that they usually support. The first round also showed that the results of advance voting and the election proper can differ radically. Halonen received nearly 50% of the advance votes, but only 44% of the votes cast on election day.

Notwithstanding all this, Halonen’s total of almost 1.4 million votes, over 46% of the votes submitted, was an outstanding achievement, even though she did not exceed the record of 48% attained by Mauno Koivisto in the first round of the presidential election in 1988.

Halonen received more votes than the two runners-up, Sauli Niinistö and the Centre Party candidate Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, combined. And her percentage was way beyond the combined result that her followers in the Social Democratic Party and the Left Alliance achieve in parliamentary elections. Halonen received at least 50% of the vote in two out of 15 electoral districts, and her percentage was below 40% in only one electoral district. Compared with the presidential election of 2000, Halonen gained most in electoral districts outside the Helsinki region; districts that were more critical of her in the previous election. Halonen received some 46% of the vote in the most populous electoral districts, Helsinki, the capital, and the surrounding province of Uusimaa. In Helsinki, however, Halonen won fewer votes than six years ago.

Niinistö narrowed the gap

Niinistö was the most successful at narrowing the gap with Halonen in the run up to the first round. Polls ranked his support at about 20% throughout the campaign, but his final tally was over 24%. It is indicative of Niinistö’s sprint down the final straight that on election day he gained a larger percentage of votes than in the advance voting. His percentage was considerably higher than the usual election results of the National Coalition party.

Niinistö's emergence as a challenger to Halonen and the very fact of the election advancing into the second round can be explained by Niinistö's success in presenting himself as a real alternative and a genuine challenger. Niinistö’s success is also remarkable in view of the fact that during his campaign he took risks. Among them was his indication that the strengthening of the Europan pillar of NATO might lead to Finland, under his leadership, joining NATO in as little as two years.

Niinistö, who has been Vice-President of the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg for some years now, refused the presidential candidacy of his party in 1999 at the last minute. Now, however, he has conducted a high-profile campaign, and he has added some human touches to his hitherto predominantly moody and humourless public image.

Vanhanen overrun

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, the Centre Party candidate, was neck and neck with Niinistö in the polls but was outrun by Halonen and Niinistö in the last week of the campaign. Vanhanen received only slightly more than 18% of the vote in the first round, which is considerably less than the parliamentary election ratings of the Centre Party.

Most embarrassing for Vanhanen was that not only Halonen, but Niinistö too, managed to penetrate the heartland of the Centre Party, namely rural areas and major towns outside the Helsinki region. In areas where the Centre Party normally commands up to nearly 50% of the vote, Vanhanen received as little as about one third. According to estimates, women who usually vote for the Centre Party voted for Halonen in the first round, while some men of the same persuasion voted for Niinistö.

Vanhanen’s poor showing in the election immediately prompted debate on whether the Centre Party needs a change of leader. This was the second election defeat during Vanhanen’s so far brief chairmanship. But Vanhanen himself quickly clipped the wings of that discussion by announcing his wish to continue at the head of his party. The party chooses a new leadership in the coming summer.
Of the five other candidates, the biggest surprise was Timo Soini, leader of the True Finns party. He received 3.5% of the vote in the first round, which is many times more than his party’s electoral ratings. Soini pursued an uncompromising anti-EU and anti-NATO stance. He gave his supporters no recommendation on who they should vote for in the second round.

The campaign of Heidi Hautala, the Green candidate, was generally considered one of the best, but she only won 3.5% of the vote. The Greens have attained double that figure in other elections, and there was speculation that most Greens had voted for Halonen in the first round. The other minor candidates — Bjarne Kallis of the Christian Democrats, Henrik Lax of the Swedish People’s Party and the independent Arto Lahti — were left with what electoral crumbs remained.