PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: Sauli Niinistö's dominance was unprecedented

For the first time, the voting percentage in the second round was lower than that in the first round

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Prior to the elections, and indeed in the minds of some from the very day when he was narrowly defeated six years ago, the election winner Sauli Niinistö (National Coalition Party), was a hot favourite and the gallup leader by a distance, and in the second round he managed to turn these huge support figures into actual votes.
      Niinistö defeated his rival Pekka Haavisto (Green League) by an unprecedentedly high margin of 25.2 percentage points. The number of Finns voting for Niinistö was slightly more than 720,000 greater than that of Haavisto’s supporters.
     
This was the fourth time when the Finnish president was elected by a direct vote. The first Finnish President who was elected by direct elections in two rounds was Martti Ahtisaari (SDP) in 1994. After him, Tarja Halonen (SDP) was elected in two successive elections.
      Of the two of them, Ahtisaari managed to forge the largest gap - 7.8 percentage points - to his opponent Elisabeth Rehn (Swedish People’s Party) in the 1994 elections.
      Halonen beat her opponents Esko Aho (Centre) and Sauli Niinistö by a margin of slightly over three percentage points in both 2000 and 2006 respectively.
     
Even though the advance voting started briskly enough, the voting percentage remained lower than the one in the previous elections.
      In 2006, the tight competititon between Halonen and Niinistö encouraged 77.2 per cent of Finns to cast their ballots.
      This time only 68.8 per cent of those eligible voted in the second round, with just 32% turning out on election day itself. In some electoral districts the figure was below 20% on Sunday.
      For the first time, the voting activity in the second round was spiritless compared with the first round, when the race for the second place between Haavisto and Paavo Väyrynen (Centre) pushed the total turnout to 72.8 per cent.
      Traditionally, the Presidential election has been the Finns’ favourite election, but this time, the polling turnout was even lower than that in last spring’s Parliamentary elections.
     
As in the first round, Haavisto’s campaign put on a spurt towards the end of the second round: compared with the advance votes, his support on the election day was slightly more than six percentage points higher.
      In the first round of the elections, Haavisto’s support on the election day was slightly more than seven percentage points higher than that indicated by his advance votes, an indication perhaps of the concentration of his support in urban areas of the south, where advance voting is neither as prevalent or as expedient as in rural parts of the country.


Links:
  MInistry of Justice Election Portal - Presidential Election 2012 Complete Results

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