Elections 2023: Finland, Bulgaria, Montenegro & scooters
Finland ousts its lady leader and turns right…Bulgaria and Montenegro go pro-West…and out with the plague of trottinettes on Parisian sidewalks.
Continuing our pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world, the focus today is on four compelling contests.
Finland: Out with the new
Another key frontline nation has taken a turn, or at least a pivot, toward the right. Finland with an 813-mile-long border with Russia, and on the cusp of shedding its long-time status as a determined neutral to become on Tuesday the first new member of the NATO alliance since Russia invaded Ukraine, appears to have ousted its first woman prime minister and the youngest ever to hold the office.
Finland’s moderate conservative icon Petteri Orpo won a squeaker of a race, ousting 37-year-old incumbent Prime Minister Sanna Marin, leader of the leftist Social Democrats and, when she was first elected, the world’s youngest leader. Still, it was hardly an overwhelming mandate, Orpo capturing just 20.8% of the vote, the far-right populist Finns coming in second with a personal best of their own with 20.1% under the leadership of Riikka Purra, 45, the Marine Le Pen of Finland. Marin won 19.9% for third place, but with more parliamentary seats than previously.
“We got the biggest mandate,” Orpo said in his characteristically low-key acceptance speech. Marin observed simply, “Democracy has spoken.”
Marin had won major points for steering her nation successfully into NATO and piloting her people through the covid pandemic. Still, it seemed as has been the case in so many nations over the past year, as Orpo pointed out, the “Finish people want change”—and a pivot to the right—which wouldhelp explain the surge for Purra and her party. Piling up seven more seats in parliament than ever before, Purra played heavily to the youth vote, especially through social media and her command of TikTok.
The issues were less Finland’s geopolitical position in Europe than domestic economic realities and the questionable moral compass of the young woman who preside for two years over the happiest nation on earth. As Harvard professor Robert I. Rothberg pointed out last month on SubStack, “for the sixth year in a row, Finns are the happiest people in the world (despite living next to Russia).”
It is also a relatively strait-laced nation with a certain moral compass. The videos that emerged last year of their prime minister singing, dancing, and drinking unrestrainedly at a party and in a fashion that seemed to many Finns inappropriate as the mother of a four-year-old daughter, did not go well, despite her explanations. The year before, however, she’d gone clubbing after close contact with a covid case, left her work phone behind.and missed an instruction to isolate. In 2018, the former chair of the Finnish Green Party was pictured dancing shirtless in a gay club. He resigned from office two months later.
Next week begins debate over Finland’s budget and, though Marin had developed an early reputation as a calm, steady leader, the fear of some of her supporters is that there may just be more videos out there lurking.
Bulgaria: Still trying for change
For the fifth time in two years, voters headed to the ballot box, yet still seemed incapable of providing any variety of stable coalition for this troubled nation with a coastline on the Black Sea that Russia has long sought to dominate. Early estimates gave the pro-Western coalition of We Continue the Change (PP) and Democratic Bulgaria (DB) a slim majority over the center-right establishment party GERB and its leader, former prime minister Boyko Borissov.
But by Monday morning, with 96% of the ballots counted, it appeared GERB had eked out a 26.5% to 24.9% plurality, touching off more bickering and likely yet another trip the ballot box. Most ominous: still hanging on were the third-place finisher, nationalist, pro-Putin Revivalist party with 14.4%, up several points since the last election; the pro-Turkish MRF with 13%; and the Bulgarian Socialists, heirs to the Soviet-era Communist Party, that still claimed 9%.
A key problem is that PP and its DB ally accused GERB of rampant corruption and economic mismanagement that has led to soaring inflation and still refuse to consider any coalition with GERB. Yet both Borissov of GERB and PP leader Kiril Petkov, a 42-year-old Harvard MBA who finished in the top 10% of his class, favor a pro-Ukraine stance for their country.
The consequences of Bulgaria’s perpetual stalemate are potentially momentous for this troubled former staunchly pro-Soviet nation. A target date for adoption of the Euro as its currency has been put off indefinitely, the nation still has no budget for 2023, and the EU’s single poorest member has been unable to claim substantial and desperately needed covid-era relief funds that are one benefit of its membership in the European Union.
Montenegro: Out with the very old
For more than three decades, Milo Đukanović has ruled this mountainous kingdom and onetime component of the now fractured nation of Yugoslavia. No longer. Đukanović was ousted, handily, on Sunday by his former economy minister, 37-year-old Jakov Milatović, deputy head of the Europe Now movement.
The victor’s pledge? To eliminate graft, raise living standards, and bring Montenegro into the European Union. Montenegro already happens to be one of the two newest members of NATO, joining the alliance six years ago, the third former Yugoslav republic to join the alliance. Yet EU membership has eluded it.
Sunday’s vote was a generational change. Milanovic ousted the 61-year-old incumbent, a former communist from Tito-era Yugoslavia, surging to a 60.1% to 39.9% landslide win in Sunday’s second-round runoff, having accused his rival of pro-Russian sympathies.
At the same time, Milanovic’s victory is seen as a boost to the nation’s longstanding efforts to join the European Union as a full member having languished for 13 frustrating years in candidate status. Now, as one political observer put it, it’s time for the EU to “show that it really is serious about enlargement.”
Indeed, in his victory speech to cheering supporters at party headquarters in the capital, Podgorica, Milanovic beamed, “Tonight is the night we have been waiting for over 30 years. I wish you a happy victory." As jubilant fans drove through the streets honking car horns, setting off fireworks, firing guns into the air, there came Milanovic’s pledge: "Within the next five years, we will lead Montenegro into the European Union."
France: And then there are the ‘trottinettes’
Anyone who has navigated Paris since 2018 knows to look both ways when crossing the sidewalks. That’s right, the sidewalks. Because that’s where the trottinettes prowl. At what often seems like hypersonic speed, emerging from nowhere, the two-wheeled self-service electric scooters have taken control of the city and terrorized pedestrians. When they are not moving, they all too often clogging up crosswalks, gutters, and curbs, cast aside higgledy-piggledy by users who have reached their destination and have no further use for them.
Like few other locations on earth, Parisians (generally young and carefree) have embraced these scooters that with an account allow registered riders simply to pick one up, log in and go, often very quickly indeed. Then at their destination, just log off, drop them on the sidewalk or in the street and leave.
But perhaps no more. On Sunday, in an unusual referendum, 89.03% voted NO to trottinettes. The vote was to ban these e-scooters, an outcome that Mayor Anne Hidalgo has pledged to respect. Of course, only 103,084, or 7.5% of Paris’s registered voters, even bothered to cast a ballot. Still, a vote is a vote, even in France. So, when the contracts with the city’s four purveyors run out on August 31, the trottinettes will be gone. Since most Parisians simply disappear from Paris for the entire month of August, that leaves just four more months of mayhem. But a warning: if you’re on foot, look both ways all the time.
The Finnish election result had probably quite little to do with Marin's dancing. After all, her party increased in votes and seats - just not enough to offset greater gains by competitors.
Probably bigger actual reasons for right-wing gains were the characteristic Finnish fear of debt and unpopularity of environmental measures in the midst of inflation. I go over this in more detail here: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/04/what-happened-in-finland