Timo Soini drew support evenly from across the country

Riikka Manner cleaned up in the rural areas of the east, where low turnout hurt the Centre Party

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Only a few of the new members of the European Parliament drew their support in Sunday's poll from all parts of the country, in spite of the fact that Finland was treated as one large constituency.
      Many gained the lion's share of their votes from specific areas, often (unsurprisingly) close to their home, where they had stood previously in Parliamentary elections. The singular exception was Timo Soini of the True Finns, who gathered his massive haul from all parts of the country, according to Statistics Finland.
      The only area of Finland where Soini did not pick up thousands of votes was the Swedish-speaking bastion of the Åland Islands.
     
Across the entire country, Soini swept up more than 130,000 votes, putting himself into 5th place on the all-time lists and becoming only the ninth candidate to break the 100,000 votes barrier.
      He collected 12,300 votes from Helsinki, and nearly 6,000 from his home town of Espoo, which is not traditionally a True Finns stronghold.
      Others who managed to get a relatively even spread of votes around Finland included former Centre Party Prime Minister Anneli Jäätteenmäki, the only successful "celebrity" candidate Mitro Repo (SDP), and the Christian Democrats' Sari Essayah, who benefited both from tactical voting by her party supporters and the election alliance that the CD forged with the True Finns.
     
Among those whose support was strongly localised was the surprise winner of the bunch, the Centre Party's Riikka Manner.
      She became an MEP in great measure through votes gathered in Eastern Finland, and also gained the greatest share of rural votes of any of the candidates, around 40% of her total.
      Nearly one in five of those relatively few members of the electorate who bothered to vote in the constituencies of North and South Savo went for Manner, while in many other areas her share fell below 1%. For example, in Helsinki Manner got just 0.3% of the total votes cast.
      Hannu Takkula (Centre) and Liisa Jaakonsaari (SDP) took their votes particularly from the north, from the electoral areas of Lapland and Oulu respectively.
     
Those who made it on the National Coalition Party or Greens tickets gathered their votes predominantly from the cities.
      The re-elected MEP Ville Itälä (Nat. Coal.) was as expected the main vote-catcher in the south-west. He gained more than 10,000 votes from his home city of Turku.
      Itälä's colleagues Eija-Riitta Korhola and Sirpa Pietikäinen both saw their strongest support coming from the cities of the south.
      The Greens' Heidi Hautala and Satu Hassi plucked their votes almost exclusively from the big cities.
      Hautala was the biggest vote-winner in the capital Helsinki, collecting more than 18,000 of her 59,000 votes here.
      Such was the dominance of Helsinki in Hautala's total that she was in fact running second behind Hassi until the very end of the count, and then surged past her to win relatively comfortably. Satu Hassi took nearly 8,500 votes in Tampere, more than 11% of the votes cast in the city.
      Carl Haglund (Swedish People's Party) was equally dependent on a strong home base, collecting no less than 80% of his votes from Helsinki and surrounding Uusimaa.
     
The highest voter turnout in the country (68.4%) was recorded in Kauniainen, and among the strong Swedish-speaking areas of the west coast and Uusimaa.
      Helsinki and Espoo also bucked the trend of election apathy with more than 50% turning out to vote.
     
At the other end of the scale came Northern Karelia, North and South Savo, and the Kymi election constituency.
      In Hyrynsalmi in Eastern Finland, only 25.5% bothered to get up from their armchair to go and vote.
      The low turnout hurt the Centre Party in particular. Those municipalities where voter participation did not reach 30% are all traditional Centre Party strongholds in the east and in Kainuu.
      The problems of the Centre Party were compounded by the fact that some of those who did bother to cast a vote chose to give it to the True Finns in a spirit of protest.
     
The True Finns' additional votes (they moved from less than 1% in 2004 to nearly 10% at this election) would appear on the surface to have been taken fairly evenly from the centre and the left, and thus contributed in their own way to the wiping out of the Left Alliance's representation in the European Parliament.
      While Timo Soini's name on the ballot obviously caught the eye, it is hard to say as yet that the True Finns actually brought out "new" voters: it might be fairer to suggest they prevented a larger number from staying at home. Subsequent analysis of voting patterns may shed more light on this.
     
In the country as a whole, voter turnout reached 40.3%, down from 41.1% in 2004.
      The figures are both well below the initial European Parliament election of 1996, but on that occasion the total (60.3%) was swelled by the holding of the municipal and European elections at the same time.
      One analyst has noted that the low turnout actually benefited one party in particular: had the percentage been closer to 50%, the Swedish People's Party, which enjoyed higher-than-average participation among its supporters, would have had a much harder time getting a mandate and a sitting MEP.

More on this subject:
 Europe deserts the left

Previously in HS International Edition:
  True Finns and Greens advance in European Parliament elections as big parties suffer (8.6.2009)
  EDITORIAL: Protest strongly in evidence at the polls in Finland and elsewhere in the EU (8.6.2009)

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