It all seemed so promising back in 2015, when the “three S’s” — Juha Sipilä, Timo Soini, and Alexander Stubb — announced their new government. The dapper Europhile Stubb, leader of Finland’s traditional conservative party, enthused that the forces joining in coalition seemed almost to have merged. He, and the whole Finnish center-right, thought this would be the government that would finally reform the social and health care system and achieve capital’s long-standing aim of forcing labor to heel. For Soini’s right-wing populist party, named simply “the Finns,” this was going to be the government that would take a hard line on immigration.

Yet the hopes of the Finnish right were to be disappointed. Four years on, Prime Minister Sipilä — the only one of the three S’s still in office — had to face the cameras and tell the nation his government had resigned, with its care reform in tatters. He had sought to reassure his Center Party’s traditional support base in small towns and rural areas by promising that the changes would retain Finland-wide health coverage. Instead, the consequences of the government’s austerity and outsourcing efforts have led these supporters to desert his party

The parliamentary election on April 14 will offer Finns a chance to pass their verdict on Sipilä’s record over the last year. But with his party slumping in the polls, and center-left forces in the ascendant, the vote looks set to mark a humiliating end for efforts to impose “business values” on Finnish welfare.