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Finland's far-right Perussuomalaiset party has agreed to enter a coalition government with the centre-right Kokoomus and two other groups
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- Title
- Finns Party: Far-right set for key role in new Finnish coalition
- Published
- Jun 16 2023
- Word count
- 33 words
Unsurprising. The bigger question is if they can actually keep the government together the whole term.
Out of curiosity, do you know any notable internal Finnish issues that would/could create wedges in this coalition? Why are they together now, do they have a particular united goal they want to accomplish?
Well, the current coalition was the only possibility for a right wing government, which the Coalition party really wanted to form for economic reasons. There are several internal disagreement between the parties on key issues. For example, the Coalition party and the Swedish party have very vocal liberal wings while True Finns and the Christian Democrats are significantly more conservative.
The coalition’s united goal is mainly in economic policy. All parties want to decrease government spending and reduce public debt. A secondary goal for many of them is to reduce income taxation, which is among the highest in the world, although it seems like it won’t be reduced that much which is a disappointment for the Coalition party.
Some key issues I can immediately think of which may create wedges in the government:
There’s also a lot of talk about healthcare, which is already underfunded, and social services in general. It’ll be interesting to see if the government will be able to tackle these issues or even survive to the end of the term.
First off, this is fascinating and I very much appreciate the primer here on Finnish domestic politics! Thank you! I have a couple follow-up questions/thoughts if that's welcome:
For my own clarity, I am assuming you mean that the former two parties have what might be called "socially" liberal wings (e.g. things like general social equality, more permissive drug laws, etc.) versus more socially conservative views for the other two parties.
It's interesting that those differences are not considered major enough to generate an irrevocable separation in the interests of those parties. As you go on to note later, it would be very easy to construe things like opposition to climate change as an impossible political pill to swallow for more 'socially liberal' politicians. Is this ability to ignore what seems to be a rather large gap in general policy something that's relatively standard in Finnish politics or is this relatively rare?
Is this a legitimately well founded issue? There's no 'correct' amount of public debt but are we talking about crushing burden on economic strength or are we talking about 'convenient' arguments about 'balanced budgets' that are just a cover for things? Notably, in the US, those things are reducing welfare and government redistribution of wealth.
These are a very interesting scale of issues. Is alcohol/temperance a supreme topic in Finnish political discussion? It seems a little out of place in that list as a more practical sin/societally important thing than an otherwise clearly nationally involved issues.
Thanks again for the discussion! Much appreciated.
Yes I meant socially liberal vs socially conservative. In Finnish liberal vs conservative usually refers to social issues while right vs left is economic policy. In general, Coalition party members are brought together by their economic stances. Mainly they want to reduce taxation and are supported by people living in cities, especially well educated voters with good income. Since they consider center-right economics their main stance, socially they're all over the place. Especially in cities they're very close to the Greens in many ways and they often compete for votes from students and university-educated high-income voters. For example, Aalto University (which is one of the top universities in Finland and focused on engineering and business) usually have their students vote pretty evenly for the Coalition party and the Greens with other parties getting basically nothing.
On the other hand, the Swedish party has language issues as their number one issue. The Swedish-Finns are approximately 5% of the population, and their rights and maintaining Swedish as an official language (as well as mandatory Swedish teaching in schools and universities) are what matters the most to them. As a result, the Swedish party has generally been very flexible and it has usually been able to join any coalition government as long as its key issues are secured. Unsurprisingly, they always get about 5% of the vote no matter what they do. That 5% however is often very important in securing a strong majority for the government.
In general, the Swedish party is center-right, but its conservative wing is smaller than the Coalition party (in general it's thus slightly more liberal). As a result, the current negotiations have been the most difficult for the Swedish party and some of their MPs have threatened to pull out of negotiations due to the overly conservative government program. However, they're now getting a lot more power in this government than they would typically get in a left wing government which has probably motivated them to not pull out.
It's true that opposition to climate change is not an easy pill to swallow for the socially liberal members of the Coalition party/Swedish party but it's good to remember that no party in Finland outright denies climate change. The debate is mainly about how aggressive Finland should be in its climate policy. The Coalition party and Swedes want to achieve carbon neutrality before goals and targets set at the EU-level while the True Finns think that it doesn't make sense for a small country to "sabotage" itself and pull ahead of other larger countries. In my opinion, it seems a bit short-sighted not to see the opportunities associated with investments into green energy etc. but that's what they're saying in the media.
Decreasing government spending is, at least to some extent, a real issue. Even all left wing parties agreed that some level of budget cutting is necessary during this term. How much it should be cut and in what ways is where the parties disagreed. Nobody in Finland wants to dismantle the welfare state but the current government says that it needs to be reduced or we can't afford it. How much of that's actually true, I'm not qualified to answer. One of the changes that will probably affect me as a student is that housing benefits will be reduced depending on your net wealth. In Helsinki, the government would pay up to 80% of your rent/housing costs up to around 450€/month. It used to only be reduced by your income but now they're planning on also progressively reducing the benefit if you have more than 10 000€ net wealth (going to 0€/month if you have more than 50 000€ in assets or a lot earlier if you have any income). Then again, there are probably also some advantages to this change as I don't know how much sense it made that you had affluent students living in expensive apartments in the city with almost 500€ of their rent paid for by the government (rents in the city center of Helsinki start at around 700/800€ a month for a one room apartment).
Alcohol definitely is a very large issue here (I think it's an issue in all of the Nordic countries really) but not as important as immigration/government spending etc. It mainly came to mind as it was one of the largest last debates in the coalition's negotiations. As a part of the Coalition party's free market ideology, they'd like to dismantle the alcohol monopoly or at least weaken it. However, for some reason the Christian Democrats strongly disagreed with this. I'm not sure why but they're a very family oriented party so maybe they were concerned about the social impacts and afraid that easier access to alcohol would lead to more drinking. In any case, this issue became surprisingly important with the Christian Democrats threatening to walk out of the negotiations and dismantling the coalition government if alcohol policy is changed too much.
Thanks for your interest!
Thank you for your absolutely excellent points on all of this. It's always extremely enlightening to hear about the nuances of domestic politics of uniquely faceted representative countries. So many interesting details float to the top like a legitimate party for minority language promotion. That would not be remotely meaningful in many other places in the world, while I'm sure it's also mirrored by other states in similar situations.
One final question, if you don't mind: To what extend is Finland federalized versus localized? Obviously this discussion has been about national elections but to independent local legislatures also pay a large role in how things would be implemented? Or is it more like administrative separations with nearly all legislation happening at a country wide level?
Finland is very centralised. All legislation and most issues are decided at a country-wide level. However, one of the parties (Keskusta, Center Party) is dedicated to rural issues and trying to give more regional power to smaller areas ("not letting the cities rule the whole country"). However, they've gone from over 20% support to 10% in just 4 years and their future isn't looking very bright at the moment.
Cities and municipalities have their own local councils which can't pass any legislation but decide on local issues. These include arranging education and schools up to a high-school level (although they very little power over the national curriculum), culture (like city orchestras), sports, libraries, urban planning, utilities and the level of local municipality tax (varies from 17.5% to 23.5% depending on where you live).
Actually one of the biggest and most controversial laws passed during the previous government (led by SDP) was the social welfare and healthcare reform. Until a few years ago, social welfare services and healthcare was arranged locally by municipalities. With the reform, new "welfare region" were formed where a single region consists of several municipalities (technically an exception was given to Helsinki, which slightly controversially continues to arrange these services by itself and was not forced to join any welfare region). New elections were held to elect a council for these welfare regions and the regions have been in effect for about a year now.
I think basically everyone agrees that some kind of reform was needed (It's been attempted for over 20 years without success. The government before the previous one had an ambitious plan but they were unable to pass the necessary laws during their term as several parts of the reform were deemed unconstitutional and they ran out of time), but most people are not very happy with how it turned out. Effectively a new layer of bureaucracy was added, new elections were added (Now you have to vote in municipality elections, welfare region elections, parliamentary elections, EU elections and presidential elections. This is considered too many by some) but many fundamental problems were not fixed. For example, these regions were not given taxation rights but instead their budget is allocated to them directly by the government. But what happens if they overspend and run out of money? You can't just let them not arrange healthcare and welfare services but instead you have to give them more money. Then again, proponents of the reform think that adding a new layer above municipalities has synergy advantages when municipalities can arrange services together instead of by themselves. This makes it easier to transfer patients to different municipalities if capacity is limited or concentrate healthcare into larger units (which is cheaper).
So as a result, there's now three levels of administration in Finland while until a few years ago there were only two. But power remains very centralised in the national parliament. Finland definitely isn't a federal state like the US or Germany.
I'm happy to answer any questions. It's a Finnish tradition to be excited any time someone wants to know something about your country. We're used to living in the shadow of our bigger neighbours (Sweden and the Soviet Union/Russia) although it does seem like things are changing now.
Thank you very much for this information! It's a completely different construction than what I'm used to. It clearly derives from a different government tradition with significantly different structural priorities.
I can see the concerns about creating a new layer of electoral complexity; my question would be, why were municipalities not already engaged in that kind of collective bargaining/regional efficiency negotiation? Was there rivalry related things? Were they not legally empowered to do so? This seems like a somewhat kludgy/blunt answer to a problem that could have been solved by already extant government apparatus.
Are there any questions about Finland you like answering the most/are most proud of? There's obviously a lot of things that spring to mind but I really don't want to waste your time just guessing :P
Some level of regional negotiation already existed but not everywhere. For example, in the capital region, there is something called the "joint municipal authority for specialised health care" which arranges healthcare services. It was owed by 24 municipalities but now ownership was transferred to Helsinki and four healthcare regions.
Not really rivalry except in salaries. Small municipalities far away from universities would often have trouble recruiting e.g. doctors to work for them so they would have to compete by paying significantly higher salaries than in cities/other municipalities. I remember getting some insane work offers as a medical student to go take a summer job as a doctor in the middle of nowhere and make some serious money (even 3-5x more than in Helsinki). It still happens, to an extent, but now salaries are mostly harmonised within welfare regions so it's more rare to get those offers. I don't really think there was a lot of competition otherwise.
I guess they had the rights but most municipalities don't want more patients or welfare receivers. They could barely afford their own population. It was on of the main reasons the reform was done. About 70% of municipalities in Finland have a population of less than 10 000 people with the smallest ones having a population less than 1000. They are often also very rural municipalities with low tax income, so they often had a lot of trouble affording to arrange the mandatory services and attracting the educated workforce necessary to supply them. The idea with the new regions was to increase the availability of the services now that the responsibility was given to larger entities.
Of course another option would be to merge municipalities (sometimes they are forced to do so), but the Center party is really against that as are the local politicians about to lose power over their 500 people and 2000 cows. I'm not an expert on social policy but this is what I've understood from my experience reading on the subject and talking to some of the academics involved.
Well, that would depend on your interests. I feel like it's always easy to think about what could be better than what you're currently proud of. At least in politics I'm glad, unlike in some other countries, it feels like most politicians really do want to make a difference and work towards making the country a better place. Historically everyone's view on what needs to be done has been very similar but more recently it feels like that unity is slowly being broken. This current government will probably be the most right-wing government in the history of Finland but I'm not really that worried. Then again, I'm not really qualified to say that since as a young and educated relatively high-income person living in a city I'm exactly the kind of person that will benefit the most from their politics. I didn't vote for any of the government parties but it'll be interesting to see how much will actually change.
Feel free to ask if you have any other questions.
Thank you again for your thoughtful responses!
I don't think I have anything else, but I can't really overstate how much I appreciate the detail!
I thought it was interesting that the main left party (SDP) actually increased it's seats. The losses were incurred by their coalition partners, the Greens, Center, and Left parties. What is the analysis for this result? It superficially feels like a contradiction that the coalition clearly lost seats, but the leading party in the coalition gained representation.
One of the most important reasons is that a lot of voters who usually vote for the Greens or the Left Alliance tactically voted for SDP even if SDP wasn't their favourite option. The goal was to make SDP the largest party or equivalently prevent the Coalition party or True Finns from winning the election and forming a right wing government. As a result of this "tactical voting", SDP gained representation but other left wing parties (especially the Greens) suffered quite a bit and the coalition as a whole lost seats. It was actually a big part of SDP's campaign to make it seem like voting for the Greens or the Left Alliance is equivalent to "wasting your vote" since SDP is the only left wing party with any chance of winning the elections anyway.
I see. And they still came in third. That's a pretty clear rebuke of the current (or former now, I guess) government. Looks like the SDP saw it coming, but their strategy wasn't enough.
Thanks for the explanation.
Yes exactly. It slightly backfired in any case. Forming a left wing government without the Coalition party would have been very challenging after the Greens and the Left Alliance lost quite a few seats as a result of SDP's election strategy.
Good point. The strategy wouldn't have worked without their partners having some electoral success. Instead, all they did was undermine the other parties, and so sabotaged themselves as well.