Founding The Green League was founded on 28 February 1987 and was registered as a political party the next year. Political activity had begun already in the early 1980s, when
environmental activists,
feminists, disillusioned young politicians from the marginalized
Liberal People's Party and other active groups began to campaign on green issues in Finland. In 1995, it was the first
European green party to be part of a state-level
cabinet. The party was founded as a popular movement, which explains its name's descriptor,
liitto, "league". Initially, there was much resistance within the movement against founding a political party, motivated by
Robert Michels'
iron law of oligarchy, which claims that movements inevitably degenerate into
oligarchies when they create a formal organization. When initially founded, membership figures could not be established with certainty because people could join more than one of the nine geographic and
affinity groups established, could also be members of other political parties, and the party's council included representatives from non-party organisations: estimates of membership around this time ranged from 700 to 1,000. The party still stresses openness and democratic decision-making, even if the Finnish word, "
liitto", has been dropped from the party's website and advertisements, the word still remains in its official and registered name.
Origins (1976–1982) One of the early forerunners of green electoral activity in Finland was the
Helsinki Movement, which stood in Helsinki's municipal elections in 1976 on an anti-
urban sprawl platform, winning 1,700 votes - 0.7 percent of the total, but not winning any seats. In the late 1970s the milieu within which Finnish political ecology would develop grew, with contacts between environmentalist, anti-nuclear, peace and human rights activists increasing, culminating in the
Koijärvi Movement in 1979-1980 against the draining of Lake Koijärvi, an important bird habitat in southern Finland. Although the movement, which radicalised from using legal channels to embracing
civil disobedience, was unsuccessful, it has been credited as the birthplace of Finnish green politics. In 1980 the Alternative Helsinki list, the successor to the Helsinki Movement, contested the Helsinki municipal elections stressing urban sprawl,
urban planning and traffic as key issues, scoring 1.7 percent of the vote and electing
Amnesty International activist
Ville Komsi to the city council. In 1982 the first of several national conferences of ecological and radical left activists was held to coordinate the work of the movement.
Early activities (1983–1994) The first two parliamentary representatives were elected even before the registration, in the
1983 parliamentary election, namely Komsi and disability activist
Kalle Könkkölä. These were the first independent representatives in the Finnish Parliament. Green candidates stood in seven of the 14 electoral districts and scored 40,000 votes, 1.5 percent of the total, achieving 3.3 percent in
Uusimaa and 4.5 percent in
Helsinki. In
1991 the party won a total of ten seats. About half of the party's members were against Finland joining the
European Union in 1994. Later, polls showed that most Greens were anti-
Eurozone. The party heads declined to fight against
euro-adoption.
As part of the Lipponen Cabinets (1995–2003) In the
1995 election, the Green League received a total of nine seats out of 200. The party joined the coalition cabinet led by the
Social Democratic Party, and
Pekka Haavisto became the
Minister of the Environment, thus becoming the first green minister in Europe. The Green League received 7.3% of the vote, and gained two additional seats in the
1999 election, raising the total to 11. The Greens continued in
the next coalition cabinet, but resigned in protest on 26 May 2002, after the cabinet's decision to allow the construction of
a new nuclear plant was accepted by the parliament.
Growth to mainstream appeal (2003–present) In 2003, the Green League received 8.0% of the vote, receiving a total of 14 seats. They increased their seats to 15 in the
2007 election while receiving 8.5% of the vote. In the
2011 election, the party lost five seats. In the
2009 European Parliament elections, the Greens gained two of the thirteen Finnish seats in the
European Parliament, which were occupied by
Satu Hassi and
Heidi Hautala. At the municipal level, the Greens are an important force in the politics of the main cities of Finland. In the municipal election of 2008 the Greens received 8.9% of the vote; the vote share was considerably higher in
Helsinki, where the Greens became the second-largest party with 23.2% of the vote. In several other cities, the Greens achieved the position of the third-largest party. The Greens are weaker in rural area and especially in municipalities that experience high levels of outward migration. By the 2017 Green League party congress, Niinistö had served three full two-year terms as the chairman and stepped down according to the rules of the party. In the following
leadership election, there were six candidates running for party chairman, of whom MP
Touko Aalto won the election. Soon after Aalto's election, the popularity of the Green League surged in the polls and raised briefly as the second most popular party in the country. However, in September 2017 the poll numbers turned into a downward slope, which continued until autumn 2018. After taking a month of sick leave due to exhaustion in September 2018, Aalto soon announced that he was resigning from his post, citing depression and fatigue. In November 2018, the Green League decided to choose a temporary chairman to lead the party into the 2019 parliamentary elections and until the next party convention. In the leadership election, former chairman Pekka Haavisto was once again elected as chairman. In June 2019, Haavisto stepped down as the chairman of the party.
Maria Ohisalo was the only candidate in the leadership election and was thus elected as chairman in the city of
Pori. In the
2023 parliamentary election, Ohisalo was re-elected with 6,937 votes. However, as the Greens suffered an election defeat, Ohisalo announced that she would not seek another term as chairman. In June 2023, she was replaced by
Sofia Virta. ==Ideology and policies==