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Finnish presidential election, 2006

Finnish presidential election, 2006
Finland
← 2000 18–24 and 29 January 2006 2012 →
  Tarja Halonen 2003.jpg Sauli Ninisto (cropped).jpg
Nominee Tarja Halonen Sauli Niinistö
Party Social Democratic National Coalition
Popular vote 1,630,980 1,518,333
Percentage 51.79% 48.21%

President before election

Tarja Halonen
Social Democratic

Elected President

Tarja Halonen
Social Democratic


Tarja Halonen
Social Democratic

Tarja Halonen
Social Democratic

A presidential election was held in Finland on 15 and 29 January 2006 which resulted in the re-election of Tarja Halonen as President of Finland for a second six-year term.

The first round of voting in Finnish presidential elections always takes place on the third Sunday of January, in this case 15 January 2006. As no candidate received more than half of the vote, a second round was held on 29 January between the two highest placed candidates from the first round, Tarja Halonen and Sauli Niinistö. Tarja Halonen, the incumbent, won the final round by 3.6 percentage points. The newly elected president formally took office for her second term on 1 March, and would have done so on 1 February, had no run-off been necessary (Constitution 55 §).

Advance voting is possible in Finnish elections, and the dates for this in the first round were the 4th, 5th and 7th to 10 January.Finnish citizens voting abroad could vote from the 4th to the 7th of January. An advantage to advance voting is that those doing so have a wider choice of polling stations (typically post offices, such as the one shown here), whereas on the actual election day the polling stations are fixed, usually schools, libraries or town halls.


The candidates are listed below following their candidate numbers. This list was confirmed by the Electoral District Committee of Helsinki on 15 December 2005.

The law states that candidate numbers start from number 2. There are various justifications, such as preventing any candidate from using the slogan "number 1" for publicity, preventing ambiguity between the numbers 1 and 7, or preventing votes from being accidentally discounted because of a resemblance to a tickmark.

Tarja Halonen candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Finland, winner of 1st round with 46.3% of votes.


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