Turnout: 70.10%
About this election
Finland held parliamentary (Eduskunta) elections on 19 April 2015. The opposition Centre Party (Keskusta), led by the businessman Juha Sipilä, won decisively with 21.1% of the vote and 49 of the 200 seats, ending the term of the National Coalition-led "six-pack" coalition. The National Coalition Party (NCP) took 18.2% and 37 seats, narrowly ahead of the Finns Party on 17.7% but behind it in seats (38). The governing Social Democrats fell to 16.5% and 34 seats. Smaller parties — the Greens (15), the Left Alliance (12), the Swedish People's Party (9) and the Christian Democrats (5) — shared the rest. Turnout was 70.1%.
The election followed a difficult term for the broad coalition assembled in 2011 under Jyrki Katainen and later Alexander Stubb. That "six-pack" government fractured as the Left Alliance walked out in 2014 over budget cuts and the Greens left over a nuclear-power decision. With the Finnish economy stagnating after the post-2008 downturn and the decline of Nokia, austerity, competitiveness and public debt dominated the campaign, and voters turned to the opposition Centre Party.
The 200-member Eduskunta is elected by open-list proportional representation using the d'Hondt method across 13 electoral districts. There is no legal threshold, but the effective threshold rises in smaller districts. Voters cast a single vote for an individual candidate, which also counts for that candidate's party list. The autonomous Åland Islands form a single-member district that elects one MP. The prime minister is drawn from the largest bloc and must command a parliamentary majority.
The result confirmed Finland's traditional "big four": the agrarian-centrist Centre Party (Juha Sipilä), the conservative National Coalition Party (Alexander Stubb), the Social Democrats, and the national-conservative Finns Party (Timo Soini), which had surged in 2011. They were supported by the Green League, the Left Alliance, the Swedish People's Party (RKP) and the Christian Democrats — the stable set of parties that structures Finnish politics around several roughly comparable forces rather than two blocs.
With growth flat and the public finances under strain, the campaign centred on how to restore competitiveness and rein in debt. The Centre Party, out of office and led by a former technology entrepreneur, presented itself as the agent of economic renewal, while the incumbents were weighed down by years of difficult decisions and a fractious coalition.
Juha Sipilä formed a right-leaning majority coalition of the Centre Party, the Finns Party and the National Coalition Party, with his cabinet taking office on 29 May 2015. The arrangement brought the Finns Party into national government for the first time, a milestone for a party that had broken through only four years earlier.
The new government prioritised fiscal consolidation and a "competitiveness pact" with the social partners aimed at lowering unit labour costs, alongside an ambitious but ultimately unfinished health-and-social-care reform. The presence of the Finns Party in cabinet would later cause turbulence when the party split in 2017.
In 2011 the National Coalition Party had narrowly finished first and Katainen formed a broad six-party coalition; that election was remembered above all for the Finns Party's "jytky" — a leap from 5 to 39 seats that reshaped the party system. The 2015 result continued that volatility, rotating power back to the Centre.
The election was fought against the backdrop of a still-fragile eurozone — the Greek debt crisis was again at boiling point in 2015 — and a Finnish economy that had underperformed its Nordic neighbours for years. As a small, open, euro-using economy, Finland had limited room for stimulus, which sharpened the campaign's focus on internal devaluation, structural reform and spending restraint.
Turnout was 70.1% of resident citizens, broadly in line with recent Finnish parliamentary elections, in which participation has hovered around 70%. Advance (early) voting is heavily used in Finland and accounts for a large share of all ballots cast.
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.