Are catchall strategies bound to fail? The catchall conundrum and the case of a niche agrarian-class party

Abstract

When viewed as a response to long-term decline in a party’s core constituency – whether class, religion or language-based – catchall strategies involve the inherent risk of marginalising the party’s core voter without achieving significant and/or sustained electoral renewal. The risk of core shrinkage will not be offset by a durable electoral dividend and the catchall strategy may well feed the very decline it is designed to arrest. Whilst catchall strategies are not the exclusive preserve of any one type of party, the type of party may well affect the likelihood of achieving a catchall performance. Following Kirchheimer, parties based on a ‘specific professional category’s claims’, such as the Swedish Agrarians, cannot realistically aspire to a ‘successful transformation’. Accordingly, this paper considers whether the pursuit of a catchall strategy by an historic, niche agrarian-class party with exceptional regional strength in neighbouring Finland could hope to achieve a ‘catchall performance’. More widely it considers whether a catchall strategy is a realistic option in multiparty systems in which ‘new politics’ parties squeeze the available policy space and multi-dimensional cleavage structures cannot readily be accommodated within a single party.

Introduction

Whether farmers’ parties in industrialising societies (Arter, 2001; Christensen, 1997; Kristinsson, 1991), working class parties in post-industrial societies (Allen, 2009; Arndt and Van Kersbergen, 2015; Bandou, 2023; Karreth et al., 2013; Meyer et al., 2012; Mischi, 2012; Taschwer et al., 2024) or religious parties in secularising societies (Cremer, 2022; Fraser, 2006; Hien, 2013; Van Keesbergen, 2008), a decline in a party’s traditional core support, or the anticipation thereof, will prompt the case for pursuing a catchall strategy in search of electoral renewal. The catchall strategy, however, carries the inherent risk of marginalising the core voter – farmer, worker, regular church/mosque-attender – without achieving a substantial body of new supporters. Paradoxically, the catchall strategy may well feed the very decline it is intended to arrest. In search of an elusive catchall ideology there will be a potential loss of party identity and a concomitant vulnerability to competitor-party challenges. This is the essence of the catchall conundrum.

Catchall strategies are not the exclusive preserve of any one type of party although, following Kirchheimer (1990), the type of party is likely to affect the prospects of achieving a catchall performance. ‘Small, strictly regional parties’ and parties espousing ‘harsh and limited ideological claims like the Dutch Calvinists’, Kirchheimer contended, simply could not, or should not seek to become catchall parties (Kirchheimer, 1990, 55). He included the agrarian party type in his list of exclusions. Consequently, focusing on the Finnish Agrarian Party (Hakalehto, 1986; Mylly, 1989; Hokkanen, 1996; 2002) which became the Finnish Centre Party in 1965 (Isohookana-Asunmaa, 2006; Katajisto, 2023) two central questions structure the analysis: (1) How far has the Agrarian-Centre’s pursuit of a catchall strategy opened the door to rival [read populist] party challengers in its traditional strongholds? (2) How effective has the Agrarian-Centre’s catchall strategy proved in realising a lasting electoral increment outside its historic heartland?

The study makes three principal contributions to the literature on party change (Harmel and Janda, 1994; Mair, 1989; Rahat and Kenig, 2018; Smith, 1989). The first is taxonomical since it urges the need clearly to distinguish between a catchall strategy - a process designed to achieve party change - and a ‘catchall party’ - a political actor that is the intended outcome of party change. It is also important, it is argued, to keep both concepts – catchall strategy and catchall party – separate from the burgeoning literature on mainstreaming (process) and mainstream party (outcome) (Brown et al., 2023; Crulli and Albertazzi, 2024).

Second, there is the claim that whilst not bound to fail – note the question in the title of this article - catchall strategies will represent a high-risk option likely to generate internal strains between the party’s core electorate and the wider targeted catchment and offset the achievement of significant and sustained electoral renewal. In the Finnish case, it is shown that populist challengers – the Finns Party (perussuomalainen puolue) and its predecessor the Finnish Rural Party (Suomen maaseudun puolue) – have exposed and exploited but not directly caused structural strains in the Centre Party which date back to the party’s change of name and pursuit of a catchall strategy (yleispuolue) in the 1960s.

Third, there is the wider conceptual question of whether a coherent catchall strategy is a viable or realistic choice in crowded, multi-dimensional, multi-party systems where ‘new politics’ niche-parties (Abou-Chadi, 2014; Bergman and Hjermitslev, 2023; Meguid, 2005; Meyer and Miller, 2015; Nonnemacher, 2023; Wagner, 2012) squeeze the available policy space. In the Finnish case, whilst the Centre’s electoral trajectory has been by no means one of linear regression, ephemeral surges in support have been largely indebted to ad hoc factors (leaders, ‘celebrity candidates’, an opposition bonus) rather than a coherent catchall strategy.

The article proceeds as follows. The first section reflects on the catchall party literature, the problems of the definition and operationalisation of the catchall party type and why the ‘catchall strategy’ is the more serviceable concept. Equally, the limitations of catchall strategies in several class (Social Democrat/Communist) and religious (Christian Democrat) parties are considered. The second section profiles the Finnish Agrarians, a class party of exceptional regional strength among a numerous population of independent small farmers in the northern periphery. The third section presents the contours of the Agrarian-Centre’s evolving catchall strategy. The concluding remarks then pull the strings together and revisit the generic question of whether catchall strategies are bound to fail.

Catchall parties or catchall strategies?

“Party watching”, as Arter (2001: 93) has noted, “would be simple if it were like bird watching…but the catchall species is difficult to spot even with the most powerful binoculars.” Mair (1989: 258) makes a similar point when observing that “strict criteria concerning what constitutes a catchall party are not easily conceived”. Indeed, Williams (2009a: 540; 2009: 593) concedes in her introduction to a special Party Politics issue that “one difficulty for scholars examining the catchall thesis comes in defining a catchall party”. Clearly, it is insufficient to define a catchall party simply as a party with a heterogeneous support base (Wolinetz, 2002) although a more heterogeneous support base is likely to be the objective of a catchall strategy.

Strategy, moreover, is the operative word, since this paper concurs with Mainwaring and McGraw (2019) that “catchall can best be seen as a series of strategies that parties adopt, whether intentionally or accidentally, in certain contexts, rather than a fixed typology of party”. These will be strategies designed to achieve what Kirchheimer (1990, 56) referred to as a “life-saving transformation” when ‘mortality anxiety’ (Bolleyer et al., 2019) looms large. Catchall strategies, moreover, should not be conflated with mainstreaming and the mainstream party. Thus, Crulli and Albertazzi (2024) wrote puzzlingly that “mainstreaming can be the consequence of catchallism” which would appear to suggest that the outcome of process (catchallism) is another process (mainstreaming).

Catchall strategies are not confined to any one type of party. Niche parties, which “compete primarily on a small number of non-economic issues” (Wagner, 2012) may seek to extend their policy range and in this way attract support beyond their core electorate (Bergman and Hjermitslev, 2023). Religious-niche parties (Kernecker and Wagner, 2019), for example, may shift their focus from moral policy to social policy or Green parties from environmental policy to incorporate feminist and sexual minority rights issues into their agenda (Abou-Chadi, 2016). In pursuing an issue diversification strategy and proceeding beyond mono-cultural appeals, nationalist-niche parties, Bergman and Flatt (2020) suggest, are best placed to broaden their electoral base.

Interestingly for this paper, Bischof (2017) has viewed agrarian parties as historic niche parties, holding a market share advantage within a narrow niche market neglected by competitor parties and pursuing a nicheness strategy designed to maintain that advantage. It follows from his analysis that by the 1960s there was a strategic reduction in the Agrarians’ nicheness and a shift from a nicheness strategy to a catchall strategy. Equally, for niche parties the pursuit of a catchall strategy is likely to involve, wittingly or otherwise, a devaluation of their ‘nicheness’ (Meyer and Miller, 2015), a potential loss of identity and the public perception of their growing proximity to ‘all the rest’.

Put another way, catchall strategies may well prove counter-productive in so far as they risk alienating the party’s core electoral constituency – so opening the door to inter alia populist challengers – without achieving the goal of electoral expansion in their targeted area. Class parties such as the Social Democrats or Communists, downplaying their ‘classness’, or Christian Democrats de-emphasising their Christian credentials are cases of the catchall conundrum (Dilling, 2024).

Thus, the response of the leading West European Social Democratic/Labour parties to post-industrialisation and a decline in their working-class core has been the development of catchall strategies downplaying their historic classness in pursuit of electoral renewal. Ties with the trade unions have been loosened (Taschwer et al., 2024) and the class-based Marxist rhetoric of state ownership replaced in 1960s West Germany and elsewhere (as Kirchheimer observed) by a narrative of promoting Keynesian demand management and welfare expansion (Meyer and Miller, 2015). Then, by the 1990s, the so-called Third Way canvassed a welfare state reform agenda and the creation of a ‘social investment state’ (Arndt and Van Kersbergen, 2015) in which there would be ‘no rights without responsibilities’. The emphasis was on active labour-market re-entry and the provision of skill-upgrading programmes for the most vulnerable sections of the labour force.

This Social Democrat ‘march to the middle’ prompted a degree of disaffection among sections of the parties’ core working-class constituency and ideological modernisation spawned the view that the Social Democrats no longer represented the working class, which turned to the radical left (Allen, 2009) and/or radical right. Karreth et al. (2013) capture the essence of the catchall conundrum. Based on an analysis of the Social Democratic/Labour parties in Germany, Sweden and the UK, they argue that a shift to the political centre is not a successful strategy in achieving their long-term goals. Rather, “moving to the centre captures voters that are no ‘safe bet’ for Social Democratic parties for future elections and simultaneously has the potential to drive more attached ‘core voters’ to other parties on the left of the Social Democrats” (Karreth et al., 2013, 815).

A mass party embedded in the working class – especially the industrial working class – the French Communist Party (PCF) was, from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, the party of the working class – parti de la classe ouvrière. In the 1970s, however, there was a shift in the PCF’s discourse from a glorification of the working-class struggle to a more general focus on the poor and disprivileged – a change of narrative that was viewed as devaluing and downgrading the party’s traditional working-class base and the network of skilled worker-activists at its helm. As Mischi put it: “the PCF replaced the figure of the worker with that of the ‘excluded’ and the denunciation of exploitation gave way to the denunciation of misery” (Mischi, 2012, 177).

The de-ideologising catchall strategy of proceeding from the class struggle and ‘workerisation’ to poverty reduction and a defence of the downtrodden cut little electoral ice. As Bell and Criddle (1989, 515) noted, “the most significant development in French politics during the 1980s was the decline of the Communist Party. Next to that perhaps was the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen who, ultimately, outcompeted the Communists by mobilising the petites gens who felt neglected, ignored and discriminated against (Jessel, 2025). Once their votes had gone to the Communists but millions switched to Le Pen.

In the face of accelerated secularisation and individualisation, and a sharp decline in the proportion of religiously active persons, the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) in the Netherlands – itself formed as a cross-denominational alliance in the 1970s – shifted focus in the 1990s from its core constituency of practising Christians to seek to appeal to so-called cultural Christians – that is, persons who are not churchgoers but have internalised, and live by, a broadly Christian code of conduct. The CDA began to espouse a brand of ‘unsecular politics’ (Van Keesbergen, 2008) that was not strictly anchored in the Bible but rather in broad Christian values and traditions. As Van Keesbergen (2008: 267) formulated it, ‘unsecular politics’ involves “stripping off the explicitly and exclusively Christian ideological baggage whilst at the same reconstructing a new Christian-inspired package of beliefs, values and norms”. As with the PCF, the CDA scarcely profited from this catchall strategy but rather opened the door to populist challengers, inter alia Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders (Koopmans and Muis, 2009; Vossen, 2011).

Historically, the agrarian parties that emerged across Europe between the two world wars – and formed a Green International based in Prague – carried little by way of ideological baggage – they travelled light. This first ‘green wave’ of parties represented the interests of farmers, whether commercial producers or family-sized operators. Their ‘ideology’ was at very best predicated on the morality and virtues of ‘countryness’ – juxtaposed to sybaritic, self-seeking, urban elites – and possibly, too, the claim to occupy a centrist position between large-scale capitalism and state socialism. The Finnish Agrarian Party differed from its Scandinavian sister parties (Christensen, 1997, 2001; Widfeldt, 2001) in that electorally it was much larger, it regularly participated in government and, from radical roots in the economic and geographic peripheries in the pre-independence decade, it became the Establishment party by the end of the 1920s. Consequently, the pursuit of a catchall strategy rendered it vulnerable to anti-Establishment populist appeals when, faced with accelerated rural depopulation in the 1960s, it sought to extend beyond its classe gardée.

Could, then, an archetypal agrarian-class party (Greenhill, 1965) give the lie to Kirchheimer (1990) and pursue a catchall strategy that would facilitate a successful party transformation? Moreover, would it follow Kirchheimer’s (1990: 55) advice that “national societal goals transcending group interests offer the best sales prospect for the party intent on establishing or enlarging an appeal previously limited to specific sections of the population”?

The ecology of the agrarian core

Before the Second World War the Agrarian core was marked by exceptional regional strength among a numerous class of independent small farmers in two constituencies in the geographic peripheries – Oulu (including Lapland) in the north and east Viipuri in Finnish Karelia bordering the Soviet Union. A homogenous population of small family farms – typically 1-3 hectares of arable (Gebhard, 1906) – worked by family labour created conducive conditions for the growth of an agrarian party (Arter, 2001; Hakalehto, 1986; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Rantala, 1967; Westinen, 2014). The standard of farming – and living – was low; there was a complete lack of capital for modernisation; and the climatic conditions were challenging. None the less, this dense body of family farms constituted a radical agrarian class and the Agrarian Party provided a channel for the articulation and promotion of its interests.

In northern Finland in particular agrarianism intertwined with currents of Christian revivalism to provide a powerful bulwark against the penetration of a counter-culture of rural communism (Kyllönen, 2010; Lackman, 1985; Nâppâ, 1981), orchestrated from Moscow by Red exiles from the 1918 Finnish Civil War. By the 1920s Talonen (1988: 57) notes that “in northern Finland the Agrarian Party was strongest in those municipalities in which [the Christian revivalism of] Conservative Laestadianism (vanhoillislestadiolaisuus) was strongest” and he estimated that the Agrarians over that decade gained one-third of their vote in the Oulu north constituency from Conservative Laestadians.

The 1920s were the heyday of political agrarianism (Mylly, 1989). By 1930 the Agrarians achieved a record national poll of 27.3% (never surpassed) and in that year 28 municipalities in the northern core were de facto Sartori-style (1976) 1-party hegemonic municipalities in which the party averaged 73.8%. In the municipality of Ranua in the north-east, a Conservative Laestadian stronghold, the figure reached 89.3%. All in all, this was exceptional regional strength.

Equally, fertile ground for a significant Communist counter-culture in northern Finland was laid by the massive expansion of the forest industry between 1890 and 1910, since this spawned a rural proletariat living on uneconomic strips of land and earning a meagre wage from employment at various stages in the pulp and paper production cycle, from felling and log-floating to work in the saw mills. The lumberjack-smallholder villages (Kortelainen, 2002) became enclaves of the radical left in the 1920s. Aatsinki (2008) coined the term ‘Red Belt’ to refer to a number of these villages in Lapland.

Banned in 1930, but relegalised as part of the armistice with the Soviet Union in 1944, communism represented the main challenge to agrarianism in the party core and already in the inter-war period villages within the same municipality could vary sharply in their political allegiance between the Agrarians and Communists (Aatsinki 2008: 317-327; Soikkanen 1970: 175-176). In any event, post-war communism grew to such a point that in the rural municipalities of Oulu and Lapland at the 1958 general election, the Communist-dominated Finnish People’s Democratic League (SKDL) claimed on average 35.4% compared with 44.1% for the Agrarians.

The Agrarians revamped their organisational base in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the radical leftist challenge but at this time two factors in particular made a case for the adoption of a catchall strategy. First, there was the loss to the Soviet Union of the Agrarians’ eastern strongholds in Karelia, although the massive resettlement of displaced persons implanted Karelian agrarianism in municipalities in the Agrarians’ Achilles heel in southern Finland. Second, there was the obligation to repay a war indemnity to the Soviet Union mainly in terms of heavy goods and machinery, since this accelerated the industrialisation process and a shift of the population to the southern cities.

The main lines of the agrarians’ catchall strategy

Step 1 A new programme and new name

The 1960s saw the Agrarian Party take two main steps in a catchall strategy designed to extend its support base into the growing towns and cities in southern Finland and become a nationally-based party. These two steps were first the adoption of a new programme in 1962 and then in 1965 the adoption of a new party name. Both were a response to urbanisation and rural depopulation. In Bischof’s terms, the Agrarians’ niche market segment was shrinking.

The Agrarians’ new programme, which was confirmed at a party conference in Kemi in December 1962, was the first to distinguish the party’s ‘leading principles’ (johtavat periaatteet) from its detailed policy agenda ‘Aims for the 1960s’ ( tavoitteet 1960 luvulla). The primary thrust of the programme was the importance of achieving a socio-demographic balance – that is, the effective use of national resources so as to keep the whole country populated and productive. Population centres, whether regional or in the urban south, should not grow so large as to diminish the rural hinterland. In a (first) short section on urban planning, it is stated that the most important task is to create a conducive living environment in towns, remove the gulf between towns and the countryside, bring to the towns the best aspects of rural life and make them ‘service centres’ for the surrounding rural areas (MAAL 275/A278).

Whilst the 1962 Agrarian programme contrived a more holistic perspective than its forerunner in 1950 (MAAL/274), the primary emphasis was on niche maintenance and there was little to corroborate the party’s retrospective claim that the programme sought more clearly to profile the Agrarians as a centre party speaking for the population as a whole (Hokkanen 2002: 564). There was no explicit reference to ‘centre party’ and the vast majority of the programmatic content related to the party’s traditional ‘market segment’.

If there was a discreet shift towards a catchall strategy it was in response to concerns about core desertion. Mechanisation and new production techniques served to reduce the demand for labour and between 1960 and 1970 300,000 jobs in the farm and forestry sector were lost, which meant (when family members are included) the displacement of over half a million Finns. The corollary was an accentuated depopulation of the Agrarian core in northern Finland, many without work relocating to the factories in Sweden (around Gothenburg for example) or seeking employment in the diversified economy of southern Finland.

Influenced by the success of Venstre (Agrarian Liberals) in Denmark, moves to reposition the Agrarians can be dated back to the 1950 party conference in Lappeenranta when Johannes Virolainen proposed an overhaul of the party programme and an adjustment to the party’s name, which would become Agrarian-Centre (maalaisliitto-keskustapuolue). His argument was that the Agrarians would be described as a centre party which, in addition to its core supporters in agriculture and the rural population, would embrace the entire citizenry and practise the type of balanced policies that would bridge the urban-rural divide (Virolainen 1969: 428; Katajisto 2017: 128). The proposal of the hybrid name ‘Agrarian-Centre’ could be viewed as a first, albeit cautious attempt to formulate a catchall strategy that would extend the party’s electoral ‘reach’ without alienating the core. There was opposition from party stalwarts and Virolainen’s initiative was stillborn.

A modernisation of the Agrarians’ name gained a new lease of life when Virolainen was elected party chair in 1964. At an extraordinary party conference in Kuopio in October 1965, Virolainen alluded inter alia to the success of the Swedish Agrarians, which had become Centre Party in 1957 and had elected their first member of the Stockholm city council in 1964. In the run-up to the Kuopio conference, moreover, the Agrarians’ central party office circulated local branches with a memorandum in which it was predicted that by 1990 barely 38% of the Finnish population would live in rural municipalities and only 13% would be engaged in farming (Isohookana-Asunmaa 2006: 60). There was a modicum of ‘diehard resistance’ and the fear expressed that a change of name would lead to a takeover by urban radicals. As a leading party activist Einari Karvetti put it: “In twenty or thirty years’ time, there will be nothing left of the Agrarians’ ideological foundation” whilst Pekka Nuutinen, a conference delegate from North Savo, commented derisively that if “bearded men with beatles’ haircuts purport to represent the farmers’ interests, then all is lost” (Arter 2001: 68). The change of name was, however, overwhelmingly approved in Kuopio. Virolainen’s thesis won the day: it was paramount, he insisted, that the renamed party should set its sights on attracting a first generation of urban dwellers with roots and relatives in the countryside.

The Agrarian Party changed its name from a position of evident strength as the leading electoral and governing party between 1962 and 1966. However, the Centre’s decision (albeit under pressure from the president) to participate in a left-wing-dominant, so-called Popular Front (kansanrintamahallitus) coalition, following setbacks at the polls in the latter year, opened the door to a substantial core backlash and defections to the populist Finnish Rural Party which, ironically, was founded and led by the rebel Agrarian Veikko Vennamo. From the outset the catchall strategy became tarred with the brush of electoral reversal rather than the intended electoral renewal.

There was considerable core resentment at the Popular Front’s blueprint for resolving a dairy overproduction problem – the so-called ‘butter mountain’ – by paying a slaughter premium, coupled with a programme of amalgamating (so-called ‘packaging’ of) uneconomic smallholdings, which exacerbated the ‘flight from the land’. The Christian revivalist elements in the Centre core in particular were disaffected with ‘their’ party’s governmental co-operation with the Communists. They were concerned to safeguard religious instruction in schools; they were opposed to legislation liberalising abortion; and they objected to a law, making middle-strength beer (keskiolut) available in grocers when previously it could only be obtained from state-run liquor outlets.

All in all, the 1970 general election pitted the social conservatism of the Agrarian-Centre’s core against communism, secularisation and urban liberalism and there was a visceral sense among core supporters that the renamed party was being captured by the likes of the city radicals in the ‘Group 70’ (ryhmā 70) faction. Evidence of a core backlash was Vennamo’s success in exploiting the perceived marginalisation of the northern periphery. In short, faced with the demographic erosion of its historic northern core, and seeking to penetrate the southern metropolitan centres, the renamed Centre fell prey to Vennamo’s populist claim that the party had abandoned its traditional support base. When sloganized as the ‘forgotten people’ (unohdetun kansa) Vennamo was able to mobilise voters whom, he claimed, the Centre had wantonly abandoned. The Finnish Rural Party polled 10.5% of the national vote in 1970 – 9.5 percentage points higher than in the general election 4 years earlier. In the Agrarians’ once-hegemonic municipalities in Oulu and Lapland, the Centre’s average poll fell from 73.8% in 1930 to 50.1% in 1970. Figure 1 presents the variable trajectory of support in the Agrarian-Centre core between 1930 and 2023.

Figure 1.

Trajectory of support in the agrarian-centre core, 1930-2023 agrarian-centre core %.

Step 2 Building a centrist bloc

Vennamo’s populist surge soon subsided, but the Centre continued to labour in the polls. Indeed, the 1970s were what the party secretary characterised as the Centre’s ‘danger years’ (Kääriäinen, 2002) and there was a widespread depiction of it as a ‘sunset party’ slowly sinking below the electoral horizon. At the 1979 general election the Centre gained only 17.3% of the national vote – the same as in Vennamo’s breakthrough in 1970 – and whilst it claimed a modestly improved 3.5% in Helsinki, it averaged only 8.5% in towns compared with 30.3% in other municipalities. The problem, according to Paavo Vāyrynen, who was elected leader 2 years later, was that the Centre “was a class party with an old-fashioned image” (Kāāriāinen, 2002: 205) when there was the need to attract young voters and tap into the centrist reserves in the towns.

It was not only the Centre Party that recorded a disappointing result in 1979. So, too, did the Liberal People’s Party and the ethno-regionalist Swedish People’s Party, both of which were viewed as centrist parties. It was against this backdrop that Vāyrynen determined on a catchall strategy of moulding the Centre and the two aforementioned parties (and, if possible, the Finnish Christian League) into a centrist bloc, able numerically and programmatically to challenge the Social Democrats and right-wing National Coalition and occupy a centrist position between them. This so-called ‘high profile strategy’ (Kāāriāinen, 2002) of projecting the political centre as a significant actor between left and right assumed an institutional form with the creation in 1981 of the tripartite (Centre, Liberal, Swedish People’s Party) Centre Council (keskustan valtuuskunta). When the predominantly town-based Liberals sought and became a member organisation of the Centre Party in 1984, Vāyrynen was able to claim (fancifully) that the Centre had become a genuine catchall party with broad support among wage-earners (Katajisto, 2023: 83). True, the Liberals withdrew from the Centre’s organisation in 1986 and many of their leading figures defected to the National Coalition or nascent Greens (Soininvaara, 2002). None the less, the Centre Party secretary Seppo Kāāriāinen (2002: 231,266) noted that many Liberals remained in the Centre and, in contributing their ideas and skills, contributed to the catchall strategy.

More pertinently for this paper, Kääriäinen (2002: 170) claimed that “cooperation between the centrist parties represented one of the few strategic weapons in the Centre Party’s arsenal that allowed the party to hold its own against the Social Democrats and radical left both at general elections and in government policy-making”. He concluded that without it the Centre’s ‘danger years’ would have proved truly fateful. Things looked very different, however, to some leading Liberals, one referring to the conference vote to become a member organisation of the Centre Party as “political suicide” (Borg 2015: 240)

Step 3 Recourse to celebrities

The Centre’s ‘high-profile strategy’ and centrist bloc-building in the 1980s, when viewed as an attempt to penetrate the metropolitan centres in southern Finland, did not yield the desired electoral dividend. At the 1987 general election – the year after the Liberals went ‘solo’ again – the Centre failed to elect a single MP in the capital city and only 2 in neighbouring Uusimaa (M = 29). Its failure to win a seat in Helsinki represented a strong, symbolic indictment of the party’s catchall strategy and it prompted recourse to an essentially ad hoc approach anchored in a ‘personalised electoral system’ (Renwick and Pilet, 2016) – open-list PR - and the growing personalisation and mediatisation of elections (Rahat and Kenig, 2018). Put another way, when, as in Finland, citizens (are obliged to) cast a ballot for an individual candidate on a party list, there is the potential for those candidates with the appropriate personal vote-earning attributes to attract a sizeable individual poll from which the entire list will benefit. These may be readily recognisable politicians – party leaders, ministers etc – and/or ‘celebrity candidates’ from outside the world of politics.

The Centre has sought to trade off the heightened personalisation of politics in two main ways. First, it has parachuted its party leaders (Aho, 1998; Jaatteenmaki in 2003 - from stronghold, up-country constituencies to run in Helsinki. In this way the party has profited from a short-term ‘leader effect’ (Arter and Poyet, 2024b). Second, the Centre has competed to recruit ‘celebrity candidates’ from outside the world of politics – sports ‘stars’, television ‘soap actors’, names from business etc – to run in the large-magnitude constituencies of Helsinki and Uusimaa (which elected a combined 60 MPs in 2023) where elections are in practice won and lost. Most notably, the 1991 ‘Miss Finland’, Tanja Karpela, standing for the Centre in the Uusimaa constituency in 2003, attracted nearly 20,000 personal votes and pulled in four other candidates on the party list. The Centre has never surpassed the 5 seats it won in Uusimaa in 2003 (Arter, 2014).

Whether the celebrification of candidate recruitment constituted a catchall strategy – or rather reflected the impoverishment of such a modernisation strategy - is perhaps a moot point. I remember at a lunch hosted by the (then) Centre prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, quizzing his aides on the party’s strategy for the forthcoming (2007) general election. The party’s trump card, they told me, excitedly and confidentially, was the captain (skip) of the national curling team Markku Uusipaavalniemi, who was running in Uusimaa. Uusipaavalniemi was elected, albeit with a relatively modest personal vote, proved a ‘loose cannon’ and subsequently defected to the Finns Party.

The catchall conundrum

From a post-Second World War high point of 24.8% in 1991, the Finnish Centre plunged to an historic low point of 11.3% at the 2023 general election – a debacle which spawned a mood of doom and gloom in the party. A party veteran, former minister and long-serving parliamentarian wrote (Kāāriāinen 2023: 6) that “the Centre is in an existential crisis, its very being is in question” whilst the party’s think-tank Ajatuspaja Alkio likened the party to “driftwood floating aimlessly downstream without a clear sense of direction”. There were calls for a new programme, new policies (Kuisma, 2024), new members and a clear identity (Laaninen, 2024; Mauno, 2025; Wiio, 2024) whilst the academic and party activist Laura Kolbe (2024) insisted that the Centre needed to find its ‘moral compass’. In her words, “the Centre needs an ideological paste that can bind together centre-minded persons in the countryside and towns, liberals and conservatives; young and old, men and women (Kolbe, 2024). Paraphrasing her point, the Centre needed a catchall ideology.

Conjuring up a catchall ideology and/or occupying a centrist position have been complicated, and the viability of a catchall strategy called into question, by the increased dimensionality of Finnish party politics since the 1980s, the emergence of new cross-cutting cleavages and competition from ‘new politics’ parties. The parliamentary breakthrough of the Greens in the 1980s pitted a growth economy against a green economy; accession to the European Union in the 1990s waged traditional cultural nationalism against an outward-looking Europeanism, whilst a feminist and minority rights’ agenda in the new millennium has juxtaposed an old (loosely Christian-based) and new (secular) morality. These cleavages have generated strains within the Centre Party between the social conservatism of its rural heartland core and the social liberalism of the party in the southern towns and cities. The Centre’s inability to define a clear position on ‘new politics’ issues, moreover, has been in sharp contrast to the populist Finns Party, which has been unashamedly and strategically Eurosceptic, eco-sceptic and ‘anti-woke’. Indeed, the Finns Party has exposed and exploited, albeit not directly caused structural strains in the Centre Party dating back to the change of name and the origins of the catchall strategy in the 1960s, but which have been intensified by the ‘new politics’ of the new millennium.

Space precludes detailed elaboration of the above points although it is germane to note how the question of EU accession divided the Centre Party. Whilst the party leader Esko Aho staked his position as prime minister on gaining a pro-membership majority at an extraordinary party conference in June 1994 (Aho, 1998, 131-134; Lappalainen and Ainola, 2019) the party core was solidly Eurosceptic and concerned in particular with the perceived problems for Finnish farmers of adhering to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In autumn 1994 EU-accession referendum, the vote in the 28 historic 1-party Agrarian-hegemonic municipalities in Oulu and Lapland averaged 66.7% against membership compared with only 33.3% in favour. Significantly, at the 2011 jytky (‘big bang’) general election, when the Finns Party advanced by an unprecedented 15 percentage points compared with four years earlier, the party leader Timo Soini was able to mobilise a residual body of up-country, anti-EU sentiment at a time when the Centre-led government was wrestling with, and inclining towards favouring bailouts for Portugal and Greece. The Finns Party’s populist Euroscepticism set the Centre core against its own party leadership.

After a (then) historic nadir of barely 13% at the polls at the 2019 general election, the Centre (ill-advisably in retrospect) participated in a Social Democrat-led coalition which included the Greens and the red-green, post-communist Left Alliance. It appeared to become hostage to an environmental agenda which neither the party leadership nor the rank-and-file supported. In contrast, the Finns Party peddled a brazen eco-scepticism which made an intuitive appeal to a body of primary producers concerned to resist restrictions on the use of their natural resources. Ridiculing the moral hysteria of the climate-change brigade, one of the Finns Party’s deputy-chairs declared before the 2019 general election that “if every Finn shot himself, it would do nothing to arrest climate change whilst another insisted that “even if Finns stopped driving cars, it would delay global Armageddon by perhaps 1 minute”. It has been ironic that whilst the Agrarians had been a member of the inter-war Green International movement, the successor Centre Party was ‘beaten’ to a green profile – and the environmental policy space squeezed – by the Greens and Left Alliance.

The defection in October 2024 of the second-term, Laestadian MP, Pekka Aittakumpu, from the Centre to the Finns Party went to the heart of the Centre’s dilemma in aspiring to catchall status. Aittakumpu cited his opposition to leftist ‘woke’ social liberalism, Extinction Rebellion and ‘rainbow ideology’ among his reasons for changing party. Themes related to the Finnish language and culture were also, he claimed, better represented in the Finns Party than the Centre (Aaltonen, 2024). He concluded that “the Centre should return to its historic roots. Access to [the electorate in] the towns of southern Finland is quite possible but it will not be achieved by pursuing a social liberal agenda” (Sutinen, 2024). Figure 2 presents the Centre’s support in the metropolitan south between 2003 and 2023.

Figure 2.

Centre support in the metropolitan south, 2003–2023.

However, therein lies the nub of the problem for the Centre’s catchall strategy, since as Maria Kaisa Aula – a Centre MP between 1991 and 2003 – has contended (Aula, 2024), an essential generational renewal of the party can only be achieved by moving in a social liberal direction. The biggest problem in general elections, she suggests, is that young adults do not see the Centre as a central player – it has slipped to the margins and does not take a clear position on many issues. The younger generation, she notes, has been socialised at a time when parties are no longer perceived as membership organisations in which to exert influence but simply electoral actors, synonymous with their candidates and the leaders they see on television. For young people, Aula continues, the buzz words are climate change, the destruction of the natural environment and sexual minorities. On ‘equality questions’ and the environment the Centre has been cautious and equivocal and that, she concludes, must change.

Indeed, I would argue that all the talk of a new programme, new policies and a clearer identity, glosses over a fundamental fault line in the party that has existed since its change of name in 1965 and the subsequent pursuit of a catchall strategy. The Agrarian-Centre is not, and never has been a party of social liberals in the ‘deep south’ and on sensitive moral issues such as gender identity and the further liberalisation of the abortion legislation, there is a chasm between the north and south of the party. This has enabled the Finns Party to capitalise by presenting itself as the true party of Christian-based social conservatism in the Centre’s traditional strongholds.

The parliamentary vote on the gender identity law (translaki), which came before the Eduskunta in February 2023 shortly before the 2023 general election, will illustrate the point (see above diagram). According to the new law, the confirmation of a change of gender requires only medical certification that the person feels the opposite gender; lives in that role; and is infertile. In addition, he/she should be an adult, a Finn and have permanent residence in Finland. The law was approved by 113-69 with 17 abstentions. All the GAL (Green, Alternative, Liberal) MPs in the Social Democrats, Greens, Left Alliance and Swedish People’s Party voted in favour; all the traditionalist TAN-inclined Finns Party (and Christian Democrats) voted against. The Centre, however, was split down the middle, 13 MPs from the more traditionalist up-country (primarily northern) constituencies opposing it and 12 from the (predominantly southern) social liberal wing voting in favour. As the former Finns Party leader commented aptly: “When there is discussion of trans people, the relaxation of the abortion law and more generally of the Christian base of society, what has the Centre to say? It is quiet or ties itself to all manner of liberal excesses” (Arter, 2024a; Koivula, 2022).

Summing up, in 2003 79% of those working in agriculture (maatalousyrittäjät) supported the Centre Party; at the last general election in 2023, the figure had fallen to 49% (Paloheimo, 2024: 136). At the 2019 and 2023 general elections the Centre’s support from persons under 35 years was under 8% compared with 14% from those over retirement age. At the 2003 general election the Centre’s average poll in the six largest southern cities (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Turku, Tampere and Lahti) stood at 11.1%; in 2023 it had dwindled to 3.2%. At the 2003 general election the Centre averaged 45.7% in its historic heartland of Oulu and Lapland constituencies when the Finns Party gained a miniscule 0.5%. In 2023 the figure for the Centre was 24.9% and for the Finns Party 26.2% (Figure 3). Small wonder that on election night an elated Finns Party secretary announced that his party had dealt the Centre a coup-de-grâce – a ‘killer blow’ – in its core support areas.

Figure 3.

Average support for the centre and Finns party in Oulu and Lapland constituencies, 2003-2023.

Concluding remarks

The thrust of the present case-study has been that the pursuit of a catchall strategy with a view to becoming a catchall party has not realised its goal in the case of the Finnish Agrarian-Centre, which has surrendered core support to populism in its historic northern strongholds without achieving a sustained electoral renewal in the populous southern towns and cities where elections are won and lost. The ‘two Finlands’ are not only geographically distant, but cultural worlds apart and difficult to contain within a single party.

But what of the wider lessons of the Finnish case? First, the paper urged the need to distinguish between a catchall strategy – an adaptive process designed to achieve party change – and a catchall party – a political actor that is the intended outcome of party change. Whilst a catchall party is difficult to define and operationalise, a catchall strategy will be designed to expand a party’s electoral base beyond its traditional core constituency – whether class, religion, language or region-based – and attract and, as importantly, retain new support.

Second, the paper maintained that whilst the pursuit of a catchall strategy is not bound to fail, it represents a high-risk option with the potential to generate internal strains between the party core and the wider targeted catchment and so offset the achievement of significant and sustained electoral renewal. This is the essence of the catchall conundrum. Reference was made in this connection to the way the Social Democrats ‘march to the middle’ prompted disaffection among the parties’ historic working-class base and there was allusion to the backlash in Christian Democratic parties following the tactical shift in focus from the core of ‘active Christians’ to so-called ‘cultural Christians’.

Typically, in response to an exponential decline in religious observance (churchgoing) in Norway, the Christian People’s Party’s decision in 2013 that, whilst its representatives should work to disseminate Christian values, they need not be Christians themselves, split the party along a fundamentalist-secularising axis. There was outrage, too, among traditionalists when, following a poor showing at the 2017 general election, the former editor of the Christian-oriented newspaper Vårt land canvassed a new party name that did not have ‘Christian’ in it. (Arter, 2024c)

Post-communist parties, too, have faced a modernisation dilemma and the loss of support to populist parties in their historic core ‘red belts’ – whether in Italy, France or Finland. One veteran, who for many years represented the Lapland constituency, held that the post-communist Left Alliance should eschew the aspiration to become an urban-led, middle-class-essaying, red-green catchall party and concentrate on the less well-off in society and those inadequately supported by the system. According to this view the Left Alliance had abandoned the party’s history of representing the working class, strayed too far from its roots and had become dominated by a younger, southern Finland-based social liberal cohort of ‘eco-socialists’ (green-reds).

Third, the article queried whether a catchall strategy could realistically hope to create a catchall party at a time when, a century after the completion of mass democracy in Western Europe, traditional cleavages have given way to new cleavages and new politics. Put another way, the historic left-right parties have struggled to embrace or negotiate new cultural antagonisms predicated on the polarised politics of ‘woke’ versus ‘anti-woke’. The available policy space has been squeezed and the room for electoral renewal delimited.

All in all, comparative experience would suggest that catchall strategies are unlikely to be party-transformative in the longer term. There may be a short-term ‘bounce’ – possibly even a significant surge of support – over two or three elections. But the loss of nicheness in pursuit of sustained electoral expansion is likely to be at the expense of the party’s niche core and internal party cohesion. Disgruntled core elements may well turn to panacea-peddling populism and the catchall strategy will feed the very decline it was designed to arrest. Kirchheimer, then, was right about the futility of catchall ambitions in agrarian parties.

Pedersen (1982) wrote axiomatically that “parties are born, parties live and parties die” but he was referring to the life cycle of new and minor parties. Larger parties rarely die; rather, faced with decline, they seek by every means to survive. Yet in multi-party systems in which ‘new politics’ parties compress the available policy space and multi-dimensional cleavage structures cannot readily be accommodated within a single party, party change strategies in general are likely to be confronted by variants of the catchall conundrum. Indeed, future research could usefully focus more not only on evaluating catchall-strategy outcomes, but on the trajectory of parties that have proceeded by rejecting catchall-type change strategies in favour of niche consolidation. This raises the further ecological question of whether parties have a ‘natural habit’ and outside of which they struggle to make sustained electoral inroads notwithstanding their best strategic efforts.