The election in Finland

Valet i Finland

Vallokalerna har öppnat – får Finland en ny regering?

Voters in a library in Helsinki. Roni Rekomaa / AP 

The election in Finland  

The polling stations have opened - will Finland get a new government?  

At 08:00, Swedish time, the polling stations in Finland opened, reports Svenska Yle.  

Voting is thus in full swing. In the channel's last poll before the election, the Social Democrats received 18.7 percent of the support, the right-wing populist True Finns 19.5 percent, and the conservative Samlingspartiet 19.8 percent. The measurement's margin of error is two percent. 

The winner, together with his coalition colleagues, will, above all, get to put his teeth into the country's state finances, the goal of net zero emissions by 2035 and the question of whether to balance out the aging population with the help of immigration, writes Bloomberg. 

The polling stations close at 19:00 Swedish time. Then the early votes are also presented.  

Riikka Purra and Petteri Orpo. TT 

The election in Finland  

Marin's challengers have voted - battle to be the largest party 

The main contenders for Finland's Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin have now voted in today's election. Pictures show how nationalist True Finns party leader Riikka Purra and liberal conservative Samlingsparti party leader Petteri Orpo cast their votes.  

The three parties are fighting for the place as Finland's largest party. It is important because the practice is that the largest party is tasked with forming a government.  

But in an editorial, Finnish Hufvudstadsbladet's Tommy Westerlund reminds that this is not written into the law. He thinks that the placement between them should not have that much importance when it is so evenly matched.  

"In practice, the central thing must still be that a government is formed by parties that have a good chance of reaching an agreement," he writes. 

The polling stations close at 20.00 Finnish time.