3. Finland: Open and Public Contests Between Independent Candidates

Like several other European democracies, Finland has witnessed a tendency towards more leader-centric intra-party practices during the recent decades. Coincidentally, the contests for party leader’s seat that are fought inside parties appear to have become more open, public and competitive. To analyse the forces that direct the selection of party leaders in contemporary Finnish parties, this chapter describes the processes that preceded the final selection in three significant cases of party leader selection from the 2010s. The studied parties—a social democratic mass party, a conservative cadre party and an environmentalist activist party—reflect variation in intra-party democracy—the organisational factor that should most likely affect the nature of the contest. However, despite some party type-specific differences, all cases share distinctive characteristics that emphasise the public and openly competitive nature of the contests, and the difficulty to “manage” them to any specific direction. In Finland, party leader selection in a case where multiple candidates emerge reminds more of a democratic election where contending groups organise to campaign for their candidates. In such cases, the central party organisation merely “facilitates” a fair contest to serve the free choice of the final principals, the party members and the delegates that represent them in the party congress.