It’s been a turbulent decade in Finnish politics. The erosion of its much-vaunted welfare state and collapse of communications giant Nokia provided the backdrop for the emergence of populist right-wing party the True Finns.

Meanwhile, its largest socialist party, the Left Alliance, joined a national unity government in 2011 prompted by the Finns’ rise, only to resign in 2014 in protest at budget cuts. In the time since the True Finns entered government following the 2015 election and, recently, split, leaving a more hard-line anti-immigrant party in opposition.

The Left Alliance, which has its roots in the Communist-led People’s Democratic League, a force that commanded as much as a quarter of the vote in the mid-twentieth century, now sits just shy of 10 percent in the polls. In 2016 it elected Li Andersson, an activist-politician and woman not then thirty years of age, as its leader.