Presidential elections

Today Hyvinkää's magistrate sent me mail concerning Presidential elections. The post mostly said when it was ok to vote and where, and offered alternatives how to cast my vote should I be out of the country when the official casting day is, what to do if I can't leave my apartment (on behalf of being nintyfive and tied to my bed) or what to do if I have both of my hands tightly wrapped in casts, thanks to skiing accident (and cant therefore do the number of my candinate in the casting pallot).

So, the elections are sometime next month, and I still dont know who to vote. There are six or seven candinates, of which three have at least some change of getting in.

Tarja Halonen, the standing president is Social Democrat. She has repeatedly gone with her morals when guiding the ship of state; basically good thing, but I feel her decisissions in the whole arent that well defined or logical. She is the "feel good" candinate. At some point, she had better popularity than Saddam Hussein (somewhere around 95% would have voted for her, if the elections would have been then - around 2002 I suppose).

Matti Vanhanen is the candinate of the Centre-party. Standing Prime Minister (eg. the person who does most of the decissions), he has very good "nice guy" imago (if we ignore the rumours about adultery - the Minister of Culture said about month ago how she can rate Sauli Niinistö and Vanhanen in bed (Niinistö is her old boyfriend)). What makes this is interesting that MoC is also of Centre-party, so should think she would have some loyality to the party, by not making such remarks (presidency is, naturally, a big thing). Vanhanen shot into public knowledge basically from nowhere, tho he has sat in parlament for years (usually with minimum ammount of votes).
The main problem with him is that he would probaply be going for helping the rural areas, which the party has traditionally has special interest in; farmers being the mainvoters of the party (previously known as the "Rural Party" or somesuch, before changing the name).

Sauli Niinistö is the candinate of Kokoomus, the conservatist party. He used to be Finance Minister, and the guy who pulled Finland out of recression and to the boom-years that gave Finland the reputation of high tech country. Currently working in European Pank. He would know how to handle the budget, and he apparently has very good grasp of how to handle things and knows stuff about economy - the bad thing is that conservatists traditionally have wanted to take steps towards more capitalist system - cutting health care and social and public services. Also, they usually arent that big for environment, so good bye Kioto.

So, we either have a woman who goes for the "feel good" line, without actually doing anything (leaving most stuff to the cabinet), a guy who wants to push money from cities to farms, or guy who wants to make the public sector smaller.

Sure, there are other candinates. I might be voting on the first row for Heidi Hautala, the candinate of the Green Party who will probaply get under 15% of the votes, and then on the second round (if there is one; it's possible that Halonen gets over 50% of the votes on the first try). I'll vote one of the big three. Or two, because either Niinistö or Vanhanen has dropped off by then.

But we shall see. Im also pretty sure I have some impressions of the candinates wrong, but I dont have that much experience in voting for presidents before, this is my first time I can take part. The last time president was elected was year 2000; didn't know much then about the people, and the previous time before that (1994) only that it was man vs. woman. Choosing is so hard. Its pretty comforting in knowing that the president dosent have that much power, and that I wont be making this decission alone.