Sanna Salo is a Senior Researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. She earned her PhD in 2017 from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and has since, before joining FIIA in 2022, worked at the Universities of Maastricht, Stockholm and Helsinki.
Salo’s field of expertise is comparative European politics, especially the Nordic countries and, most recently, Germany. Her research focuses on the responses of mainstream European political parties towards the challenge of the rising far right. Salo currently works in two projects: RESLIDE, studying the Resilience of Liberal Democracy in Finland, with funding from the Finnish Strategic Research Council. Secondly, Salo runs her own project titled Divided and Lost? The Strategies of Center-Right Parties to the Radical Right Challenge in Finland, Sweden and Germany, funded by the Kone Foundation
Salo has written extensively on the topic of mainstream party responses to the far right. Together with Professor Jens Rydgren (Stockholm University) she has published a book titled The Battle Over Working-Class Voters: How Social Democracy Has Responded to the Populist Radical Right in the Nordic Countries (2021), which studies the responses of Nordic labor movements to the rise of the radical right in the region.