Sunday, April 17, 2011 9:46 PM

Finland Vote 100% In; Anti-Bailout Block In Majority; Coalition Math

The results of this weekend's election in Finland are in. The current pro-euro, pro-bailout government has been ousted and a coalition of other parties will rule.

There are 18 parties in Finland in the recent election. Many of them are fringe parties, but the splitting of the vote is such that the winner barely exceeded 20% of the vote.

Voters in the US may be interested to see what something other than a two-party system looks like.

Finland General Election Results



The first eight parties got all but one seat.

My friend Tero who lives in Finland has been updating me on the results. A couple days ago Tero wrote ...

I'm glad to see that our Finnish stance at the Euro region bailout has been noted by you. Most people here just don't see the point of throwing good money after bad when we know it will not do any good. Eventually it would put us in the same position where Greece is now. We've been there ourselves in the early 90's and the solution was debt restructuring which was done by currency devaluation which obviously is not an option anymore. An average Joe here understands that we would be only bailing out German and French banks.

That is why I'd like to vote for the party you call "True Finns". However, I can't. Other than that one position, the whole party is a big mess. They might make decisions that would be catastrophic for Finland.

By the way, "True Finns" does not describe the party or its name. It doesn't translate into English very well but "regular", "basic" or "average" would be closer than "true". Best translation I can come up with is "common Finns".

A few hours ago Tero wrote ...

The negotiations to form the government are going to be very interesting. There are many possible combinations. This is the first time in history of Finland that the National Coalition Party is the biggest party.

Because of the surge in the "True Finns" and the position of the Social Democrats, expect very tough terms set for the bailouts if they don't get vetoed outright.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts next week.

Voters Protest Against Bailouts

Bloomberg reports Finland’s Euro-Skeptics Set for Government After Election Upset http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-1 ... on-1-.html

Finland’s euro-skeptic bloc is poised to form a government with the pro-Europe National Coalition led by Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen after voters used yesterday’s election to protest against funding bailouts.

The True Finns, whose leader Timo Soini says taxpayers shouldn’t have helped rescue Greece or Ireland, jumped almost 15 points to 19 percent, the Justice Ministry said. Katainen’s National Coalition won 20.4 percent to become Finland’s biggest party for the first time. Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi’s Center Party got 15.8 percent and the Social Democrats, which also opposed bailouts for Greece and Ireland, won 19.1 percent. Kiviniemi will lead her party in opposition after its “huge defeat,â€