Finnish parliamentary election, 2003

Finnish parliamentary election, 2003

← 1999 16 March 2003 2007 →
All 200 seats to the Parliament 101 seats were needed for a majority
Turnout	66.7%
First party Second party Third party   Leader Anneli Jäätteenmäki Paavo Lipponen Ville Itälä Party Centre Social Democratic National Coalition Leader since 2000 1993 2001 Last election 48 seats, 22.4% 51 seats, 22.9% 46 seats, 21.0% Seats won 55 53 40 Seat change 7 2 6 Popular vote 689,391 683,223 517,904 Percentage 24.7% 24.5% 18.6% Swing 2.3% 1.6% 2.4%   Fourth party Fifth party Sixth party   Leader Suvi-Anne Siimes Osmo Soininvaara Bjarne Kallis Party Left Alliance Green League Christian Democrat Leader since 1998 2001 2001 Last election 20 seats, 10.9% 11 seats, 7.3% 7 seats, 5,34% Seats won 19 14 7 Seat change 1 3 3 Popular vote 277,152 223,564 148,987 Percentage 9.9% 8.0% 5.3% Swing 1.0% 0.7% 1.1%   Seventh party Eighth party Ninth party   Leader Jan-Erik Enestam Timo Soini Yrjö Hakanen Party Swedish People's Finns Communist Party Leader since 1998 1997 1990 Last election 11 seats, 5.1% 1 seat, 1.0% 0 seats, 0.8% Seats won 8 3 0 Seat change 3 2 0 Popular vote 128,824 43,816 21,079 Percentage 4.6% 1.6% 0.8% Swing 0.5% 0.6%
Prime Minister before election Paavo Lipponen Social Democratic Prime Minister Anneli Jäätteenmäki Centre

Paavo Lipponen
Social Democratic

Anneli Jäätteenmäki
Centre

Parliamentary elections were held in Finland on 16 March 2003. The Centre Party led by Anneli Jäätteenmäki overtook the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to become the largest party in the Eduskunta. This was credited mainly to Jäätteenmäki's powerful leadership and modernization of the party still often viewed as agrarian and conservative by many. However, the SDP actually won some seats and increased its share of the vote, losing in the amount of total popular votes only by few thousand.

The Green League achieved its best results ever, but the Swedish People's Party suffered losses. The Christian Democrats gained votes but lost seats. This was partly because in 1999 and before Christian Democrats had been in an election coalition with Centre Party and benefited from this, while the Centre Party had lost seats due to the arrangement, and thus discontinued it starting from 2003. The Left Alliance continued its slow decline, while the small populist Finns Party did not do as well as some had expected.

The election was held under the d'Hondt method of party-list proportional representation, where the electoral district voted directly for the individual candidate, but each vote also benefitted the candidate's party.

The country was divided into fifteen electoral districts, with the boundaries corresponding to those of administrative regions (in some cases several regions have been grouped into a single constituency), with the exception that the city of Helsinki serves as its own constituency, instead of being part of the Uusimaa region in this case. Each constituency elected a number of representatives to the Eduskunta based on its population. The autonomous region of Åland had a special status with one representative even if its population was not large enough.

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Wikipedia