EDITORIAL: Shortage of candidates for Presidential Election 2012

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Tarja Halonen’s second six-year term as President of the Republic is approaching the halfway mark, so one might imagine the presidential game would start to pick up momentum.
      In all quiet, the National Coalition Party’s Sauli Niinistö, the runner-up to Halonen in 2006, has emerged in the public mind as the overwhelming favourite to succeed her as Finland’s head of state.
      The Centre Party appears to have nobody in the frame to replace Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, and the Social Democrats are in an even greater mess.
     
With this sort of background to the race, Niinistö’s advantage is so firmly established that in a direct election he will be very hard to beat.
      All this depends, nevertheless, on the assumption that Niinistö - currently the Speaker of Parliament - is ready and willing to step up as a candidate once more.
      Doubts about his possible reluctance have faded of late as Niinistö has appeared to enjoy life more and more in the public spotlight.
     
The most natural presidential candidate from the Centre Party ranks, at least in terms of his position, would of course be Matti Vanhanen, now in his second term as PM.
      But in an interview with the newspaper Kaleva on Sunday, Vanhanen regarded his own candidacy in 2012 as unlikely.
      At this stage he can appeal to his intention to carry on as the party chairman and to seek a third prime ministerial appointment after the parliamentary elections of 2011.
      Then again, right now that second ambition does not look very likely to come to pass.
      As Vanhanen himself said, the Centre Party, too, will in any event require their own candidate in the first round of the presidential elections.
     
The presidential run of the Social Democrats - set in motion by Mauno Koivisto’s two terms and continued through Martti Ahtisaari and Halonen - does not appear to have much of a future.
      During Paavo Lipponen’s long term at the SDP helm there was neglect of bringing through the party's next generation, and the Social Democrats quite simply do not look to have any sufficiently strong names to put forward as candidates for the office.
      The absence of politically weighty candidates shows up clearly in the names put forward for the upcoming European Parliament elections in June.
      When the one-term SDP chairman Eero Heinäluoma chose not to run for the European Parliament, perhaps he can be persuaded to be the party’s candidate in a domestic presidential election.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.1.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Vanhanen: no run for Presidency in 2012 (26.1.2009)

Helsingin Sanomat