Meta’s top lobbyist in Brussels is off to Helsinki, after winning a seat Sunday 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 center-right National Coalition Party, she tweeted late Sunday.
The fiscally conservative National Coalition Party won the most votes in Sunday’s election, defeating outgoing center-left Prime Minister Sanna Marin.
In a phone interview Monday morning, 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] U.S. 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. The tech company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Salla’s election win. Before she led teams at Meta, Salla also worked for five years at the European Commission.
Meta has a full plate in Brussels, as it will have to comply with new obligations emanating from the bloc’s new content moderation and digital competition rulebooks: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.
