Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Finland votes out Sanna Marin's Social Democrats | DW News" video.

It's because nordic countries have a proportional parliamentarian system. So you never see binary election results where a party 100% wins or 100% lose like in some other countries. Instead parties increase or decrease their relative power. And from what I understand the party of their former prime minister actually gained 3 seats in the parliament compared to the last election. But no one can rule in a Nordic country alone these days, so if her coalition partners lost seats (something I assume they must have) that means that her coalition as a whole lost power. But she might still end up in goverment. As the center right party that won will need support and may very well choose to ally with her in order to get enough seats to win. They've (presumably) won because they're the biggest party and therefore gets the first chance to try to form a government. If they fail to get enough seats to back any proposed cabinet then the second biggest party will try and third biggest etc. So she definitely can achieve things. And even if she doesn't take part in the coalition she may still get some of her politics through. I don't know enough about Finland to give examples. But here in Norway it's normal with minority governments where parties that don't take part in the coalition itself may support them comming to power in return for concessions, but they're not obligated to keep supporting everything that the government wants to do. So you get different majorities on a case by case basis. And our previous conservative goverment actually had to rule based on a left wing budget that was voted in if I don't remember wrong as one example. The conservatives still decided the details of how the budget was used, but yeah... A goverment doesn't fall just because one party stops supporting them here.
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@EpicHashTime She went to 3rd because two other parties gained more voters then she did. But she didn't lose seats, she actually gained 3 seats. So she's actually in a stronger position in the parliament then she was in term of her own party, even if her coalition isn't. She could easily end up in a coalition with the winner here.
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@wolfswinkel8906 I'm not Finnish, and the party that did lose in Finland is the Finnish sister party of my own here in Norway, the Greens. But that doesn't change that she didn't lose. This is a parliamentarian system, no one has won yet, it's the parliament not you that elects the prime minister. And said prime minister usually achieves that majority by negotiating other minestry positions and political concessions. Who will actually win isn't something we'll know for sure till they're done negotiating. But we do know that she and her party have 3 more seats to bargain with during said negotiations then she did last time.
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@frozello14 No, if you had one party of Nazies that's the biggest party in a country and no one wants to cooperate with them because they're Nazies and the majority of people voted for other parties, then those other parties working together in a coalition is the winners even if they're not the biggest. Indeed sometimes the two biggest parties may not even be a member of the governing coalition because while they have the most votes as single parties you'll find that coalitions including them essentially has less votes then the other side. Yes, gaining more seats is a victory, you get more influence. But the real victory is to win votes in the parliament, including, but not limited to the vote for who should be prime minister. For the prime minister role if the 3 biggest parties fails to come up with anything else that's better and you end up with the previous 5 party government plus some other party leading to a majority then yes, those previous five parties should continue to rule if they manage to get enough other parties supporting them. It involves negotiations. The benefit of being the biggest party is that you get to try first. As for the exact election results I keep seeing articles about parties winning or losing seats, but not being Finnish I've yet to see a up to date overview of the seat distribution. But my point is that any combination of parties that gets more seats, however they manage to get it is equally valid in terms of honouring the election results as any other combination, regardless of the size of the parties involved.
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My guess is that the only noticable change in foreign policy might be a slight reduction in aid to Ukraine if they're aiming to balance the books...
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@Commievn Who are you referring to? Also, the American assumption that you have nothing to learn from European nations and that our sizes somehow disqualifies anything we have to say is just ignorance... Most US states have some European nation or other it can be compared with that's fairly similar in any given metric, yet we generally perform better when it comes to actually running a country... Don't get me wrong, there's things we are doing or have done that you most definitely shouldn't copy, but having a continent be 50 countries instead of 50 states that's all pretty much a copy cat of each other in terms of governance means that we have tried out way more ways of actually running a country then you have. And yes, sometimes that went horribly wrong... Britain and Russia is arguably examples of that just now... But it also means that we've already tried out most things and know a thing or two about what does or doesn't work. The advantages and disadvantages of different approaches etc. And we can learn from the mistakes of others and also point them out so they can learn from what we notice about their system... And the US system... Well, at least you have freedom of expression, something that Russians don't have... But the electoral system in the US is actually worse then the Russian one interestingly enough... Of course, without freedom of expression that doesn't help much and the US is still preferable to Russia...
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@ĐoànĐạiDương-f1n It makes a lot of sense. Left leaning voters who might vote far left in good times see the debt increasing so they may vote center left instead. And centrist voters may switch over to the center right instead of center left. And the center right shifts to the far right. The bulk ended up in the center right. But you can see how conserns about high spendings can shift peoples position in a proportional parliamentarian system, right? People still voted for parties they overall agree with, but they shifted to a slightly different nuance of that view.
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@jmolofsson You guys are acting a bit weird when you talk about "personal votes"... The whole point of party list proportional systems like what's used in Finland is to not vote for people but for parties and politics. Yes, when it comes to the biggest parties having a halfway decent prime minister candidate is important. But at the end of the day it's not what decides what most people vote for. People where concerned for the debt. And people shifted right within the range of parties that they felt comfortable with. That means that far left voters shifted closer to the center, and centrist ones further right economically... There might have been other political divides at play too, but that's the essence at least. On the whole she did better as a party leader as her party grew. And since she's free to form coalitions with the center right it really doesn't matter that much if her coalition partners lost seats or not in that regard...
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@Commievn In the US you only really have two political parties. Sure there's factions within them, but the politicians you're dealing with are fundamentally at least in the same ballpark as you are. Here in Norway FRP (far right populists, the former party of Brevik, the racist guy that killed houndreds of labour party people because they where too pro-immigration for his taste) and Rødt (A party formed from the merger of several far left parties, including the communists) have worked together to get politics through before and they will do so again. Parties have to work together to get results here. "Wouldn't last a day", you're underestimating the patience and screwdness needed by Nordic politicians. A US politican trying out work here would last months, but he wouldn't have anything to show for it, because your system is designed to encourage confrontation and trying to take down opponents, something that would just leave you open from the flank by other parties here. Anything negative a US politican could possibly use against one of our politicans would leave him wide open to another party on the other side to attack. While US politics is essentially American fotball ours is 5D chess. There's 10 political parties represented in our 169 seat parliament here in Norway this term. So whatever voter demographics you could possibly go for there would be other parties gunning for the same exact voters with different solutions and well thought out critique of anything you're doing politically... As for personal attacks, they tend to backfire badly...
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@frozello14 Any combination of parties that ends up with a majority is honouring the election results in my book, big or small. Just having the big parties banding together because they're the biggest isn't really democratic in the long run, even if it's definitely a good option occasionally. But each party should try to find the best deal they can get from the other parties based on the election results for their own voters. For a large party that may involve executive power or even the prime minister job. But staying in the opposition may also be a better call occasionally. It all depends on the situation.
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