are experts in the economy,” 64-year-old Jorma Mahonen said after casting his ballot in Helsinki.
Rafael Donner, 25, was pessimistic.
“I don’t think this election is going to change much. Society won’t accept that GDP can’t grow forever,” he said.
“I believe we in Finland have enough. I look at my friends and they all have iPhones, go on holiday to nice places, and have brunches every weekend.”
If a Centre victory is confirmed, Sipila’s first task will be to pick his coalition partners. Tradition dictates that the largest party takes the post of prime minister and forms a government with the other largest parties to obtain a majority in parliament.
Several weeks of thorny negotiations are expected before Sipila is able to present a coalition.
Faced with Finland’s economic woes, “the government programme will be quite difficult to create,” Helsinki University political history professor Juhana Aunesluoma predicted.
Three parties are fighting for second place, hovering between 14 and 17 percent in the polls: Stubb’s conservative National Coalition Party, the Social Democrats and the right-wing eurosceptic Finns Party.
Sipila has not revealed which parties he would like to see join his future coalition.
“We need... new entrepreneurship and new jobs in the whole of Finland. We need bold solutions and goal-oriented leadership,” Sipila said.
He has vowed to create 200,000 private sector jobs in 10 years.
The vote will be closely watched in Brussels: the Centre has a strong eurosceptic faction, and the Finns Party is fiercely opposed to what it considers interference in Finnish affairs.
“The eurozone is at the moment a catastrophe,” Finns Party leader Timo Soini, who is gunning to be a government minister, told AFP in an interview.
“Greece should get out of the euro and devaluate the drachma and get their economy on its feet again and maybe later join the euro again,” he said.
Stubb, who has held the government reins since June, was optimistic on the eve of the vote as a projection put his party in second place with 16.8 percent.
“I still believe in the gold medal,” he wrote.
None of the main party leaders made any comments on Sunday as they cast their ballots, while Sipila had voted in advance.