Finnish voters have elected Sauli Niinistö from the moderate conservative National Coalition Party as the nation's 12th president in a decisive second round on Sunday, February 5th. 

The 63-year-old former finance minister defeated the Green’s Pekka Haavisto by 62.6 percent to 37.4 percent.

He becomes the first non-Social Democrat head of state in Finland since 1982 and the first to be drawn from the ranks of the National Coalition since 1956.

Niinistö won a majority in 14 of the country's 15 electoral districts. The only exception was in the autonomous Åland Islands district.  In Helsinki the two men were evenly matched with barely 1,000 votes between them. Niinistö’s largest lead was in Vaasa where he won with 72.3 percent.

Slightly over 4.4 million people were eligible to vote. At 68.8 percent, voter turnout for the second round was the lowest in a presidential election since 1950.  

In the first round two weeks ago, when voters were choosing from a field of eight candidates, the turnout was 72.8 percent.

Niinistö will take over as president from Tarja Halonen on March 1.

Preliminary figures for the number of advance votes cast at diplomatic missions abroad in the second round of the Finnish presidential elections reached a record high of 50,367. This is 6 per cent more than the number of advance votes cast in the first round (47,780), which was the previous all-time record. The number of voters was up 30 per cent on the figure for the second round of the 2006 presidential elections at 38,849.

The number of Finnish citizens living abroad and eligible to vote this year was over 230,000.

The highest number of advance votes was again cast in Sweden (11,949), followed by Spain (8,308), the United States (3,568), the UK (3,239), Germany (3,096), Thailand (2,676) and Belgium (1,536).
(M.C.)