Presidential Elections, Round 1 Results: Short Update

The first round of the presidential election came and went. Since there’s little important happening in politics apart from it – sure, some dramas, like the Defence Minister making a blooper leading to 500 people quitting the military reserves – might as well just present the results.

Some have summarized it as “The biggest surprise was that there were no surprises”. Abroad, the most attention had been received by nationalist candidate Jussi Halla-aho, who had made a late spurt in the polls and did quite well, receiving 19 %. Olli Rehn, Centre Party candidate who managed to catch some buzz, also did fairly well compared to the sad state of his party (and a surprising amount of my friends, usually not a very Centre-party-friendly crowd, voted for him).

However, he was dwarfed by the main candidates, Alexander Stubb from National Coalition and Pekka Haavisto from the Greens (technically independent but who cares), advancing to the second round. The second round will be held in days, so the news has been full of debates between candidates. Such debates mostly appear to be intent on finding something, anything, particularly substantial to differentiate the candidates.

The most substantial question is whether, now that Finland is in NATO (both candidates support this, of course) she should accept nuclear weapons on her soil, with Stubb being rather more open to this idea. Nevertheless, Haavisto has not closed the door fully, either – to me, it would seem likely that if the US really wanted to push this issue, both would eventually accede.

Likewise, the supporters of the candidates are fast at work online. When it comes to issues, I’ve seen some Haavisto supporters go as far as to refer to election quizzes where, on a number of issues, Stubb says that he “somewhat agrees” with whatever claim, while Haavisto “fully agreed” with it. Of course, there are personal factors (ie. Stubb is straight and Haavisto is gay, Stubb comes from an elite background and Haavisto has an activist past etc).

This has become something of a local debate in the days preceeding the election, especially after a surprisingly large number of Stubb supporters – 40 % of them, this of course including a lot of conservatives who didn’t vote for Stubb in the first round – stated that one of the factors why they are voting for Stubb is Haavisto being in a same-sex relationship. I rather doubt *too* many of these would have voted for a Green candidate in the first place, either, though.

For the first time in my life, I've “voted empty” – went to vote, but not for either of the candidates. Not as a protest, but simply because this is the biggest Tweedledum and Tweedledee election I've seen in my lifetime; there's not much difference between the candidates expect in nuance (both are socially liberal, Atlanticist and Europhile), neither particularly causes me a feeling that I should vote for them, neither causes a feeling that I should vote for the other one to vote against them, neither causes much feelings at all.

What finally forced my decision was talking to a Haavisto campaign worker on the local marketplace. After I had discussed my feelings with her on this matter a bit, she said “well, if you feel that way, perhaps you should indeed vote empty” – this gave me a powerful feeling that if even the campaign workers can’t give me more justification than that, how could I do otherwise?

On the other hand, this is probably the perfect state of politics to be in anyway. In the 00s, “politics are boring” was almost a mantra in Finnish media, as the Finns Party had yet to rice and all the three main parties essentially agreed on the most important things – the market, the welfare state, EU, having some immigration but not too much, having some environmental laws but not too much etc. – with only nuances being somewhat different. This was also a time of heady economic growth and people having a positive vision for the future. Neither of the presidents will achieve that, of course. Who knows if anything will.