page_title: Finns Party
section_title: 2017 leadership election and split
hierarchical_section_title: Finns Party / History / 2017 leadership election and split
caption_attribution_description: English: Jussi Halla-aho is a Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician for the Finns Party.
context_page_description: The Finns Party, formerly known in English as the True Finns, is a Finnish right-wing populist political party. It was founded in 1995 following the dissolution of the Finnish Rural Party.
  In the 2011 parliamentary election, the party won 19.1% of votes, becoming the third largest party in the Finnish Parliament. In the 2015 election the party got 17.7% of the votes, making it the parliament's second-largest party. The party was in opposition for the first 20 years of its existence. In 2015 it joined the government coalition formed by Prime Minister Sipilä. Following a 2017 split, over half of the party's MPs left the parliamentary group and were subsequently expelled from their party membership. This defector group, New Alternative, continued to support the government coalition, while the Finns Party went into opposition. It increased its representation from 38 to 39 seats in the 2019 parliament election.
  The party combines left-wing economic policies with conservative social values, socio-cultural authoritarianism, and ethnic nationalism.
context_section_description: In June 2017, Jussi Halla-aho and Sampo Terho faced off in the leadership election, in which Halla-aho received 949 votes against Terho's 646 votes and thus succeeded Soini as party chairman. Sipilä and Finance Minister Petteri Orpo soon announced that they would not continue their coalition with the Finns Party if it was led by Halla-aho. Subsequently, twenty Finns Party MPs, including Soini and Terho, defected to form a new parliamentary group under the name New Alternative, later renamed into Blue Reform. As all cabinet ministers were among the defectors, the Blue Reform made an agreement with Sipilä to stay in the government.
  Following the split, MPs Veera Ruoho and Arja Juvonen left the Finns Party parliamentary group to continue as independents, after which the party's seats were reduced to fifteen. All of the defecting MPs were subsequently expelled from the Finns Party. In the following weeks, MPs Ritva Elomaa and Arja Juvonen regretted their decision and re-joined the party, raising the amount of MPs to seventeen.
  The party nominated MP Laura Huhtasaari as its candidate for the 2018 presidential election. In the election, Huhtasaari placed third with 6.9 percent of the votes, while the incumbent president Sauli Niinistö went on to secure his second term with a majority of votes.
caption: Dr. Jussi Halla-aho, chairman elected in 2017.
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