Members of Parliament are elected every fourth year. In 2023, Parlamentary Elections advance voting in Finland is 22–28 of March and in abroad 22–25 of March. The Parlamentary Election day is 2 April.
The Finnish Parliament is unicameral and comprises 200 representatives. For the purpose of parliamentary elections the country has been divided into 13 electoral districts in accordance with the division into provinces. A number of representatives proportional to the number of Finnish citizens residing in the district six months prior to the elections is elected from each district. However, from the electoral district of Åland is always elected one representative.
The Parliament of Finland enacts laws, decides the State budget, supervises the activities of authorities subordinated to the Government, and adopts international agreements. Parliament chooses Prime Minister who is officially appointed by the President of Republic. The Prime Minister chooses the other members of the Cabinet who are appointed by the President of Republic. The Cabinet shall enjoy the confidence of the parliament.
Every Finnish citizen who has reached the age of 18 not later than on the day of the election is entitled to vote.
The so-called d’Hondt method is used to determine the election results. Thus, in the first stage of the calculation the total number of votes of each group, i.e.
- party which does not belong to an electoral alliance,
- joint list, and
- constituency association which does not belong to a joint list,
- electoral alliance,
is counted. Parties, which have formed en electoral alliance are thus treated as a single group, as are constituency associations on a joint list. In the second stage of the calculation the candidates in each group are ranked in order of their personal number of votes. In the third stage each candidate is accorded a comparative index, i.e. the candidate who has received most personal votes is accorded an index which equals the total number of votes of the group, the second best candidate half of that, the thirdb best a third, the fourth best a fourth, and so on. In the final stage all candidates within the electoral district are listed in order from best to worst according to their comparative index, and the representatives elected from the district are chosen from this list.
The preliminary election results are ready to be published already on the evening of election day.
Read more about Parlamentary Elections