Finnish Prime Minister-elect Petteri Orpo, whose center-right National Coalition Party (NCP) won the country’s parliamentary election last month, says he intends to form a government with the national conservative Finns Party that the NCP beat by the narrowest of margins.
In a press conference on Thursday, April 27th, Orpo announced that formal coalition talks—which can often take a month before an agreement is hammered out—will begin on May 2nd between the NCP, the Finns Party, the Swedish People’s Party, and the Christian Democrats, the Helsinki-based newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet reports.
If negotiations between the four right-of-center parties are successful, the incoming coalition government would collectively have 108 of the 200 seats in the Riksdag and would thus enjoy a clear majority. Having won 48 seats in April’s parliamentary election, Orpo’s NCP is poised to be the senior partner while the Finns Party, with its 46 seats, would play the role of junior partner.
“We really have big challenges ahead, we have to make difficult decisions, we have to make savings, we have to make reforms but I think they can be done and with this combination, I think we can do it,” Orpo told members of the press.
Negotiations, however, are not expected to be painless since the Finns Party holds positions on issues like migration and the European Union that are quite different from those of the NCP and the Swedish People’s Party (SFP).
According to Mikko Majander, a political scientist from the think-tank Magma, “a heated debate is expected” as the four parties engage in negotiations.
“[Finns Party leader Riikka] Purra must have a clear influence on immigration policy. In exchange for that, they can compromise on other issues,” Majander told AFP.
Speaking on the anticipated difficulties of coalition talks, Orpo said: “There are of course differences between the parties. But following [preliminary] negotiations we collectively feel that the issues can be resolved.”
The Finns Party, with its considerable leverage due to the large number of seats they hold, will enter negotiations with one firm demand. The party says it will only join a government that greatly reduces all immigration—the reception of asylum seekers and labor immigration— which it considers “harmful” to the country.
On Thursday, the Finns Party leader Riikka Purra called immigration a “threat to both security and the economy,” but added that the party was open to “negotiation.”
“There are certainly things we can agree on in the area of labor immigration,” she told the press.
SFP leader Anna-Maja Henriksson, for her part, said that “it is quite clear that it will be the outcome of the negotiations that determine whether we join the government or not.”
