A little more on Finnish politics

Something has me a little bit confused. This is going to require a bit of explanation though.

Finland has a sort of mixed presidentialist/parliamentarian political system. Up until the 2000 constitutional ammendments, the president was quite a powerful figure. Now the president is mainly a figurehead for the republic, and is politically involved mainly in issues of foreign affairs.

Most of the rest of the powers invested in the executive in the US fall in Finland to the Prime Minister, that guy over there on the left, Matti Vanhanen. He and his cabinet of ministers take care of domestic issues, and other general political matters.

Now, here is where the mixture of systems comes into play. The president is directly elected by popular vote (since Finland has abandoned the eletoral college system similar to that used in the US). The Prime Minister, like in your run of the mill parliamentary government, is elected internally and generally comes from the party holding the most seats in that body (unless you're in Germany apparently). I'm not yet certain how Finland Parliamentary elections work, but from what I can gather it's a hybrid between list voting and individual. Since I am giving a presentation on this next Wednesday, I suppose I should start reading up on the subject. In any event, Finns do not directly vote for the Prime Minister in the same way that they do the President.

As you've read previously here or elsewhere, this year was a presidential election year in Finland. Matti Vanhanen was among the list of candidates for president, however he didn't make it past the first round. In fact, Vanhanen finished (it's hard to remember to type only one "n" in that word;)) third with 18.6%, behind Niinisto with 24.1% and Halonen with 46.3%.

Now that all that's out of the way, here's my question: How can a guy so influential in the Finnish political scene, maybe the most powerful person (it seems to me like the prime minister is more powerful and the president is more respected only out of tradition- correct me if I'm wrong) perform so poorly when he's directly voted for or against by the Finnish people? The numbers aren't even close! And what does this poor performance mean? Are the Finnish people so happy with the job he's doing as Prime minister that they don't want to let him out of that spot? Would they like to see him out of that position too, or if prime minister was voted for directly would he earn that office? It's difficult to know, and considering the debate between the democratic-ness of presidentialist vs parliamentary forms of governance, Finland hybrid could be an important case study for comparitive studies.