I’ll be pausing the Finnish Politics Recaps for the summer, but it’s probably necessary to go through the most important political event of recent weeks.
The European Parliament elections happened. The European Parliament elects 720 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the member countries to represent the legislative assembly (one of the three main institutions) of the European Union. While the European Parliament is often castigated for weakness compared to the executive branches, the European Council, and the European Commission, it still has a fair bit of power when it comes to, for instance, the various regulations of the European Union.
The elections also act as an ideological barometer for political developments in Europe, though since the turnout is low, this factor is by necessity diminished.
On both the European and the Finnish levels, the theme for this election was the feared/desired rise of nationalist groups and the possibility that EPP, the center-right of the European Parliament consisting of various center-right parties from member states, would start cooperating with the nationalists like center-right parties do in many member countries.
The rise did indeed take place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries. There's still a high chance their influence will grow in the coming parliament, at least for the "moderate" ones (ie. the ones that do not challenge the basic idea of the European Union or the general Western foreign and security policy, like support for continuing to fund Ukraine.)
In Finland, the Finns Party crashed, getting one of their worst results in well over a decade. Since the tiny further-to-right microparties went down even harder, this probably reflects partially movement to the center-right National Coalition, increasingly growing more right-wing as the Finns Party’s co-partner in government, and partly party supporters just staying home and not voting for anybody.
Probably the main reasons are twofold:
The Finns ran a very underwhelming campaign concentrating on things like the new EU regulation mandating bottlecaps that stick to the bottle after opening. The caps are, I guess, mildly annoying and might cause dribbling when using some packs, but heavy concentration on this sort of issue just comes off as frivolous. In general, since EU membership is more popular than ever, they're in a bind. Moving to the center pisses off the remaining hardcore Euroskeptic base while doing an "EU is pretty lame, Finland has no influence" spiel just evidently makes their supporters think there's no point in voting.
They're in a government that's doing, on a Finnish scale, hard austerity and anti-union policies, which their supporters don't like. Also, anti-migrant measures, which their supporters do like - but getting the center-right to cosign those only makes it easier for their educated wealthier voters who have voted the Finns to cut immigration (but still consider them too redneck and embarrassing) to return to the center-right. This was aided by the center-right National Coalition running several prominent “security” candidates, easy for conservative men with bookshelves full of war novels to vote for.
The Finnish Left got a huge surprise result, beating all the parties other than the National Coalition, the obvious winner. This has been speculated to be due to the vast personal popularity of Li Andersson, the party leader who was running as the main candidate, and partly was probably a protest vote against the government.
However, it also reflects the growing acceptance among the general “red-green voters”, the mass of left-wing urbanites smoothly moving between Social Democrats, Left, and Greens as they fit, of the reformed post-Communist party, particularly as Andersson had many chances to distance herself from the anti-Ukrainian voices on the European Left, promising to marginalize them in the coming parliament. Future polling and elections will demonstrate if it is possible to build further success on these grounds, with the municipal and regional elections next year being a particular test.
There's little chance that the new parliament will be much improvement compared to the previous ones in terms of getting Europe out of its deep-set economic funk. Most likely the centrist coalition will continue, which offers more stability than the right-wing cooperation with parties that continue to at least somewhat retain their Euroskeptic instincts, but this is the stability of business-as-usual, not an enticing proposal when the business-as-usual has been 15 years of little to no growth in the EU.
This is exemplified by the results of the onslaught of Marine le Pen's RN and some other nationalist parties in France leading to Macron calling for new parliamentary elections. While they wouldn't lead to Macron himself getting thrown out, if RN and the other groups do well or even get a majority, France might get gridlocked for at least three years. These would hardly be three years that the EU, with France of course being one of its most important countries, can afford to waste.