I f you go to this chart, and you scroll through the various geographic voting districts in Finland, it gives you a good view of the breadth of the surge of the True Finns in Finnish politics.

They were expected to do well in the rural areas, which has long been the party's base. But as the graphs show, they did well everywhere. They even polled pretty well in Helsinki, historically their weakest voting district.

Here's the final tabulated national vote:

% Change P-07 Change M-08 Change P-07 Change M-08 Change Center Party of Finland 15,8 -7,3 -4,3 463160 -177268 -50040 35 -16 National Coalition Party 20,4 -1,9 -3,1 598369 -18472 -779 44 -6 Social Democratic Party of Finland 19,1 -2,3 -2,1 561049 -33145 +18927 42 -3 Left Alliance 8,1 -0,7 -0,7 238473 -5823 +14303 14 -3 Green League 7,2 -1,3 -1,7 212837 -21592 -15440 10 -5 Christian Democrats in Finland 4,0 -0,9 -0,2 118514 -16276 +11678 6 -1 Swedish People's Party in Finland 4,3 -0,3 -0,4 125865 -655 +5639 9 0 True Finns 19,0 +14,9 +13,6 559342 +447086 +421584 39 +34

The story here, obviously, is that the True Finns gained almost as many votes in this election (as compared to 2007), as the governing coalition partner Center Party got. The Center Party will no longer be in the governing coalition. The True Finns will almost certainly be asked to help form a new government. The question is: on what terms would they agree to do so?

We don't really know enough about Finnish politics to answer that question. What we do know is that the rise of the right in European politics is gathering strength and breadth.