Green League

The Green League, (Finnish: Vihreä liitto [ˈʋihreæ ˈliːtːo], Vihr; Swedish: Gröna förbundet [ˈɡrøːnɑ fœrˈbʉndet]; Northern Sami: Ruoná lihttu; Inari Sami: Ruánáá litto; Skolt Sami: Ruânn lett) shortened to the Greens, (Finnish: Vihreät; Swedish: de Gröna) is a green political party in Finland. Ideologically, the Green League is positioned on the centre-left of the political spectrum.

Originally split on whether Finland should join the European Union, the Green League adopted a pro-European stance. It was the first Finnish party in favor of the federalisation of the European Union. The Green League is among the midsized political parties in Finland. The Greens hold thirteen of the 200 seats in the Finnish Parliament and two of Finland's 15 European Parliament seats. The party is a member of the Global Greens and the European Green Party; its MEPs sit in the Greens–European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament.

Founded in 1987, the party absorbed a number of green organizations and their members, electing its first MPs in the 1987 Finnish parliamentary election. The party won ten seats in the 1991 election. Despite small losses in the 1995 election, Pekka Haavisto joined Paavo Lipponen's first cabinet, which was composed of a "rainbow" coalition. This made the Green League the first green party to form a national cabinet. The party remained in government until 2002 when it resigned in opposition to nuclear power. The party slowly rose in popularity between 1995 and 2007, winning a total of 15 seats, and joined the centre-led Vanhanen II cabinet. In the 2011 election, the party suffered significant losses, dropping to ten seats, but remained in government. In 2015, the party recovered its losses, returning to 15 seats. In the 2019 election, the party achieved by far its best-ever result, winning 20 seats and 11.5% of the vote. They became the fifth-largest party in parliament and the third-most-big member of the Rinne cabinet.

After the 2017 municipal elections, the Green League was the fourth-largest party with 534 seats. They gained 211 more seats since the 2012 Finnish municipal elections. Since June 2023, the party's leader and chairperson has been Sofia Virta. From 2015 to 2019, the party was in opposition. It provided harsh criticism regarding the policies of the conservative Sipilä cabinet on financial support for economically well-off companies, Fortum's purchase of Uniper, and the expedited process of constitution-changing surveillance laws.

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. 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.

The first two parliamentary representatives were elected even before the registration, in the 1983 parliamentary election. These were the first independent representatives in the Finnish Parliament. In 1987 the number of seats rose to four, and in 1991 to a total of ten.

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.