IT BECAME THE defining image of the Finnish election campaign: Sanna Marin, the Social Democratic prime minister, and Riikka Purra, leader of the hard-right Finns Party, wagging their fingers furiously at each other during a televised debate. Yet in the end the winner was neither Ms Marin nor Ms Purra but the third candidate in the debate. Petteri Orpo’s centre-right National Coalition party narrowly won Finland’s general election on April 2nd, taking 20.8% of the vote to the Finns’ 20.1% and the Social Democrats’ 19.9%. Mr Orpo now faces the task of forming a governing coalition. It will be no easy job.

The 37-year-old Ms Marin, who has been prime minister since 2019, won international fame for her strong support for Ukraine and decisiveness in bringing Finland into NATO: on April 4th it will become the 31st member of the military alliance. Although her image was coloured by an embarrassing leak last summer of home videos showing her dancing enthusiastically with friends (she took a drug test to squash rumours), Finns had come to take Ms Marin seriously after her solid handling of covid policy. “She came in as a young prime minister in a difficult situation, but she was very credible as a leader throughout the pandemic,” says Teija Tiilikainen, a political scientist.

Yet Ukraine and NATO were barely mentioned during the electoral campaign, since almost all Finnish parties now agree on them. The National Coalition party is at least as firm on defence as the Social Democrats; two of its new MPs are former generals. And the Finns Party, unlike many hard-right populist outfits in Europe, has few traces of sympathy for Russia. It prefers scepticism towards the European Union and climate policy, and hostility to immigration.

The campaign was mostly fought on other grounds. Fiscally conservative sorts, Finns worry about government debt, which rose to 75% of GDP during the pandemic. Rising defence spending will exacerbate that problem. Mr Orpo promised to bring the deficit down by cutting social spending; Ms Marin had promised to raise it.

Analysts said the election displayed a new phenomenon for Finns: tactical voting. Both the Social Democrats and the National Coalition urged sympathetic supporters of smaller parties to pick them instead, in order to increase their chances of coming first and leading the government. As a result, big parties got bigger and most small ones shrank—the opposite of the trend of fragmentation observable in most other European democracies. The Social Democrats, for example, cannibalised the votes of the Greens, whose share fell to 7% from 11.5% in the previous election in 2019. The centre-right Centre Party, once the country’s biggest, shrank to 11.3%.

So while Ms Marin did reasonably well, increasing the Social Democrats’ vote share, the overall result was a shift to the right. The Finns Party’s rise to 20.1% from 17.5% in 2019 is especially significant. In his search for a majority, Mr Orpo’s most straightforward choice would be to form a solidly right-wing government with Ms Purra. If that fails, he will have to try to create a centrist “red-blue” government with the Social Democrats. A minority government, with supply-and-confidence support from another party, is probably not an option: “Finland doesn’t do minority governments,” explains Ilkka Haavisto of EVA, a think-tank in Helsinki.

The policy implications of the hard-right option are hard to predict. The Finns Party has moderated its image somewhat. In 2019 one of its campaign advertisements depicted a fiery ancient monster arising to avenge the Finnish people on their corrupt leaders. This year it pleaded for the country to burn domestic peat to alleviate its energy shortages. The party tends to combine left-wing attitudes on social benefits with right-wing ones on climate and especially immigration. “It’s a little unclear what the economic policy line of the Finns Party is,” says Jarkko Eloranta, president of SAK, the Finnish trade-union organisation. “We can’t be sure what they are thinking.”

Moreover, the party would have to give up many of its priorities to join a coalition. Its immigration policies clearly clash with those of the National Coalition, which wants to increase it to alleviate the shrinking of Finland’s workforce. So do most other parties, notably the RKP, which represents the country’s Swedish minority and might be needed to round out a coalition with the Finns—especially since the Centre Party’s leader says it will now go into opposition.

It is not yet clear if Ms Marin will remain the leader of the Social Democrats. Either way, her party will need to bide its time and see how Mr Orpo’s negotiations work out. Should he fail to form a coalition, it may yet get a chance to try again. But for now, Finland seems to have lost its international figurehead. It was unusual for such a stoical country to have a flamboyant leader. Mr Orpo represents a reversion to the norm. ■