These personal votes are hugely important as Finland operates a truly open list system. If a party wins three seats in a constituency, it is their three candidates with the highest personal votes who get elected. This is combined with membership primaries for deciding which candidates get on the list in the first place. In all, central party leaders have much less influence over who is elected than in most other countries.

This open list system has been attributed as the reason behind Finland’s particularly high level of demographic representativeness in parliament. In 1907, Finland elected the first nineteen women MPs in the world. By 1991, when just 6% of British MPs were women, they made up over a third of Finnish MPs. In the last parliament this figure had reached 47%.

Finland’s major and minor parties

The uniqueness of Finland’s politics extends to its party system, which is unlike those of its Scandinavian neighbours. The social democrats have nowhere near the dominance they have in Sweden or Norway and, rather than minority governments built around one of two blocs, Finnish governments are typically large ‘oversized’ coalitions.

The party system itself displays a clear and fairly stable balance between three or four larger parties who win around 15-25% of the vote and a similar number of smaller parties who take around 4-12% of the vote.

Of the larger parties, the three ‘traditional’ members are the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), the formerly agrarian Centre Party (Kesk) and the conservative National Coalition Party (Kok). All recent Prime Ministers have come from one of these three parties and typically two of them are in government at any one time. The right-wing populist Finns Party (PS) have won a similar level of support to these three in recent elections.

The four smaller parties at present are the Left Alliance (Vas), the Green League (Vihr), the Christian Democrats (KD) and the Swedish People’s Party (SFP), who represent Finland’s significant Swedish-speaking minority and are nearly always in government. In recent years, it has increasingly looked like Centre might fall into the smaller group, while the Greens have occasionally polled on a par with the larger parties.

Highly consensual form of government

When we say that Finnish coalitions are ‘oversized’, we mean that they contain more parties than are strictly needed for a majority in parliament. For instance, Sanna Marin’s current coalition includes the SDP (40 seats), Centre (31), Greens (20), Left (16) and SFP (9), yet would reach the 101 seats needed for a majority with just the first four.

This highly consensual form of government is partially a legacy of the fact that, until 1992, one-third of MPs could delay a bill coming into effect until after the next election; having two-thirds of MPs on side was therefore the norm. Despite the abolition of the procedure, consensualism remains deeply ingrained.

Each of the 12 constituencies will elect more than one MP. To decide who they are in each constituency, the amount of votes needed to get elected ‘the quota’ is set based on ‘total votes / total seats’, e.g., if 8,000 votes were cast in an eight-seat constituency, the quota would be 1,000. Any candidates that won more votes than this are elected.

Parties win a seat for each time they exceed the quota – if their candidates in total won 2,800 votes with our 1,000-vote quota, they would win two seats; if they won 3,200 votes, they would win three seats. If they already won a seat in the first stage, that is subtracted from their total. Seats won at this stage are allocated to the party’s candidates in order of who won the most votes. Only those parties that won 5% of the vote nationally can win seats this way.

The final stage occurs at the national level, with any remaining seats allocated based on national vote totals using a modified version of the D’Hondt method. Again, a party must have won 5% of the vote nationally to win seats at this stage. Seats won at this level are awarded to candidates in the order they appear on the party’s list.

In terms of the partisan composition of parliament, it is this final step that is most decisive – with the overall result effectively being a national list system with a 5% threshold.

Estonia is a pioneer in electronic voting, with voters able to vote over the internet since the 2005 municipal elections. Although only 3% of voters voted online in 2007 (the first national e-elections anywhere in the world), that number had reached 44% by the last election in 2019. Such voting is made possible by Estonia’s smart ID cards.

Estonian Parties and Government

Unlike a lot of eastern Europe, Estonia has developed a fairly stable and recognisable moderate multi-party system, with between four and six parties winning seats in recent elections.

The most dominant party in Estonian politics has been the economically and socially liberal Reform Party, who have held the position of Prime Minister for 14 of the past 20 years and been a junior partner in government for another four. The centre-right party has consistently polled 28-29% of the vote in the last four elections.

The second-largest party has been the Centre Party, which has won 23-26% of the vote in recent elections and models itself on the Scandinavian parties of the same name. Ideologically, it has been a little hard to pin down, but it is typically seen as broadly populist. The party has seen a bit of a dent in popularity in the last year due to its association with Estonia’s Russian minority.

Two other parties have held a continuous position in parliament and have participated in multiple recent governments – the centre-left Social Democratic Party and the conservative Isamaa (literally Fatherland). Both parties have averaged in the mid-teens over the last few elections.

Despite Estonia’s solid liberal democratic credentials, it hasn’t been able to escape the right-wing populist wave that has touched virtually every European country in the last decade. The far-right Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) is strongly majoritarian and, in line with Italy’s far-right wishes to abolish proportional representation.

The largest party not to win seats at the last election were Estonia 200, a social liberal party who fell short of the 5% threshold. They are expected to win seats next Sunday.

Governments in Estonia have typically been coalitions of two or three parties – currently the Reform Party govern with Isamaa and the Social Democrats under Reform PM Kaja Kallas. She has gained international and domestic support for her strong leadership over the invasion of Ukraine, a key issue for a country that also borders Russia, with this expected to help secure Reform another term as largest party in the Riigikogu.

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