In a 53 to 32 vote on November 30, the Helsinki City Council rejected a proposal to build Paris-based Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’ design for a new Guggenheim satellite museum on the Finnish capital’s waterfront. The city council’s decision is the culmination of five years of fierce dispute, which has rattled Finnish politics and sparked debate within the architecture community.

Johanna Lemola, a spokeswoman for the Helsinki municipal government said the crucial meeting was “highly emotional.” Those in favor of the project, mainly from the political right, argued that the museum would increase employment and boost tourism as the Guggenheim’s Frank Gehry-designed satellite did for Bilbao. The political left and the populist Finns Party, meanwhile, objected to the use of public money to partially fund the $138 million museum. The meeting was so tense, according to Lemola, that it was even suggested that some councilors did not attend out of fear for their safety.

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The project’s turbulent history reflects the Finnish people’s deeply divided opinion on the virtue of injecting a global franchise into Helsinki’s cultural scene with taxpayers’ money, especially at a time when the government has imposed significant austerity measures. Other trepidations have come from the project’s perceived lack of transparency, its prime waterfront site, and the belief that the local art scene is robust enough as is.

Despite the skepticism, Ari Lahti, a Finnish businessman and the chairman of the Guggenheim Helsinki Supporting Foundation, suggested that the city council’s ruling did not represent public opinion.

“Based on a survey conducted just a week before vote, the museum would have been supported by the majority of the citizens,” he said in an e-mail. “If the government would have been formulated differently, or had the Finn’s party not been struggling to keep their voters satisfied during the beginning of their governmental term, we could have seen a different outcome.”

Guggenheim Foundation director Richard Armstrong could not be reached for comment, but speaking with the New York Times, he said, “I suppose that it was a reaction to a sense of engulfing internationalism, or a reaction against globalism."