Facebook’s top EU lobbyist wins Finnish parliament seat

Meta's top lobbyist in Brussels is off to Helsinki, after winning a seat in the Finnish election.

Aura Salla, who leads Facebook parent company Meta's public policy team in Brussels, won a seat in the Finnish parliament for the centre-right National Coalition Party, according to Politico.

The fiscally conservative National Coalition Party won the most votes in the election, defeating outgoing centre-left Prime Minister Sanna Marin.

In a phone interview, Salla said she wants to push Finland to take a "more proactive" role in European politics - and promised to fight domestically for a "stable economy," a subject on which her party attacked Marin's Social Democrats.

"We cannot have our welfare society in Finland if we don't have a stable economy," she told Politico from Finland. "That was one of the primary reasons for me to run because I was super worried how this social-democratic left-wing government actually left this country ... [with] huge debt for our children."

The EU's internal market will be one of the topics Salla will work on in Finnish politics, she said. "We can never compete with China or [the] US if we can't get this Union to have the real single market we've been aiming for," she added.

Salla is currently still employed at Meta, as she ran her campaign during her maternity leave.