As Finns head to the polls on Sunday welfare, immigration and the climate are the main issues on the agenda, with a poll released on Thursday putting the Social Democrats in the lead.
The left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SDP) under the leadership of Antti Rinne topped the most recent poll with 19.0 percent support, Finland's public broadcaster Yle reported on Thursday, although it would need to build a coalition to form a stable government.
Speaking to Reuters, Rinne said that the country needs to strengthen its welfare society and the party plans to do this by raising taxes but ruled out forming a government with the nationalists led by Jussi Halla-aho, an anti-immigration hardliner, who was fined by the Supreme Court in 2012 for blog comments linking Islam to pedophilia and Somalis to theft.
Halla-aho's party, the Finns Party, have made rapid gains in recent months, in part due to rising anti-immigration sentiment following a number of cases of sexual abuse of minors by foreign men.
Helsinki residents also said that climate change was a key issue when it comes to casting their votes.
Pekka Haavisto, leader of the Green League said that the opinion was changing rapidly throughout Finland and that his party had succeeded in draw attention to environmental issues.
Since the last parliamentary elections, in 2015, centrist Prime Minister Juha Sipila has made preventing Finland from taking on more debt one of the government's main goals together with pulling the country out of the three-year recession that eventually ended in late 2015. Last year, Sipila's government managed to cut Finland's outstanding debt for the first time in a decade.
Autor: gf / Źródło: TVN24 News in English, Reuters
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