Turnout: 54.30%
About this election
For the first time, Finland held its municipal and county elections on the same day, 13 April 2025. In the municipal contest the Social Democrats topped a municipal election for the first time since 2004, winning 23.10% nationally, just ahead of the National Coalition Party (21.90%). The Finns Party suffered heavy losses, falling to 7.60%. The Centre Party again won the largest number of individual council seats. Turnout was 54.3%, electing councillors to 308 municipal councils.
Municipal councillors are elected every four years by open-list proportional representation (d'Hondt) within each municipality; voters cast a personal vote and council size reflects population. Holding the municipal and county elections together for the first time was intended to lift participation and reduce administrative cost, since both tiers are now elected on the same candidate-centred model.
The contest featured the usual Finnish line-up, but with a notably different outcome from recent years: the Social Democrats surged, the National Coalition held firm, and the Finns Party collapsed from its 2021 high. The Centre Party, the Greens, the Left Alliance, the Swedish People's Party and the Christian Democrats made up the rest of the field.
The elections were a mid-term referendum on Petteri Orpo's right-wing national government of the National Coalition, the Finns Party, the Swedish People's Party and the Christian Democrats. The strong SDP gains and the sharp fall for the coalition's Finns Party were widely read as a backlash against the government's spending cuts and labour-market reforms, which had provoked strikes and protests.
The most dramatic shift was the Finns Party's slump to 7.60%, less than half its record 2021 municipal share. As a governing party associated with unpopular austerity measures, it bore much of the blame at the ballot box — a reminder of how participation in national government can cost a populist party at the local level.
Finishing first in a municipal election for the first time in over two decades was a significant symbolic victory for the SDP, then in opposition. It suggested that the centre-left had recovered ground lost during its own years in government and was well placed to benefit from discontent with the Orpo coalition.
Turnout was 54.3%, broadly in line with recent municipal elections; the experiment of combining the municipal and county votes on one day was intended partly to arrest the long-run decline in local participation.
Statistics Finland (Tilastokeskus) and the Ministry of Justice election results service — stat.fi.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.