Finnish presidential electiom

In five weeks`time there will be presidential elections in Finland. If none of the candidates(eight have so far emerged) gains more than 50% of the votes cast, there will a second round two weeks later between the frontrunner and the runner-up.

The office of presidency has undergone a lot of changes in Finland. In the past decades, the president was the one who called the shots, he was the one who was the undisputed political leader of this country.

However, this arrangement was considered somewhat problematic as the country also wanted to carry out government based on parliamentarism. This in turn resulted in endless squabbles between various presidents and governments.

One remarkable era in the political history of Finland was the period of Urho Kekkonen`s presidency 1956-81 during which the presidential powers de facto rose well above those prescribed in the Finnish constitution.

In fact, Kekkonen factually governed the country on his own and the government was little more than a team of henchmen.

This development was not sustainable and as soon as Kekkonen had to retire because of poor health, the new president Koivisto of SDP set about with changing the constitution more into the direction of a parliamentary form of government.

Dr.Koivisto was succeeded by martti Ahtisaari, a fellow social-democrat, who chose to be a one-term president. In the meantime, there was a great work in the process aimed at changing the Finnish constitution.

One of the most controversial items of the new constitution is the diminished powers of the institution of the president of Finland. The new constitution, which took effect on March 1,2000, restricts the rights of the president to the consent of the government.

Today, after six years of the new constitution, people still regard the office of the president very important. That only shows in the immense interest directed at this subject on various website-chats. More concretely, the turn-out is expected to be well above the meagre 65% of the last parliamentary elections in 2003.