Where have I been? / Recent developments in Finnish politics
Well, it's been a while since I last posted anything. So, where have I been? Well, apart from school, I recently got a part time job, which has limited my already limited free time even more. I was also sick for a week, which is something that normally doesn't happen to me. So quite simply, I haven't had the time, the energy or the motivation to really focus on writing anything. That being said, I'm back and as the title suggests, there have been some interesting developments in Finnish politics, which I've been planning to cover for a while.
First, let's start with Paavo Väyrynen. You may remember that he was one of the candidates in the recent presidential election, and that in my posts about the election, I gave him some special attention (links at the end). The reason is pretty much the outcome of the election. Since it was pretty clear from the beginning that president Sauli Niinistö would win re-election, the election lacked that sense of heightened emotion seen for example in the 2016 US election. Instead, the more interesting competition was between Väyrynen and the Center Party candidate Matti Vanhanen. I went into greater detail about this in a previous posts. In summary, Väyrynen is a veteran politician and has been a member of the Center Party for his whole political career. He's actually a former party leader and is considered the party's honorary chairperson. However, in 2016, he founded his own political party called the Citizen's Party, while also refusing to resign from the Center Party. Problem here is that the Center Party's rules prevent the party leadership from kicking out individual members. Instead, members have to be kicked out by the various member organizations, mostly meaning the local party branches. However, Väyrynen just happens to be the leader and the founder of the branch he's a member of and understandably, the idea of kicking out your leader is somewhat problematic. So essentially, the only way for the party to get rid of Väyrynen, would be to sever ties with one of its local branches, something that they don't seem willing to do. Basically, Väyrynen has been a thorn in the party's flesh for a while now, so the idea of him beating their candidate in the election could be considered a slap in the face.
Since 2014, Väyrynen has been serving in the European parliament, however, he was elected to the Finnish parliament in 2015. However, he chose to not take his seat because he didn't get a position in the cabinet. His seat was taken over by Mikko Kärnä, a man, with whom I actually had a short exchange on Twitter regarding conscription (because of course I've challenged MP's on this issue, what did you expect?). However, during the presidential election, Väyrynen stated that if he doesn't win the presidency (which, as stated before, didn't happen), he would leave the European parliament and return to the Finnish parliament. Naturally, he would be representing the Citizen's Party and stay in the opposition. He has also been nominated as the party's candidate for prime minister in the 2019 election. Originally his return to parliament was due to happen sometime during the Spring, but shortly after the election he threw a curve ball: he would be running for the Center Party's leadership in the 2018 party convention, scheduled for early June and that his return to national politics would be delayed until that. He claimed that this would be his last effort to "save" the party, which he sees as having lost its roots and if he failed, he would resign from the party and focus on leading the Citizen's Party in the 2019 election. Understandably, lot of people thought he had to have some other reasons for this decision. I mean, he had already promised to make a return to national politics as a representative of the Citizen's Party and was considered their candidate for prime minister in the next election. Lot of people, myself included, kinda saw this as a publicity stunt. Essentially the idea was that he wasn't really trying to win. He was just trying to get attention in order to get a head start on the Citizen's Party's 2019 election campaign. And in a way, it did work. This whole thing was all over the news. The Center Party went into a bit of a panic and was trying to prevent Väyrynen from running. The party consulted some legal experts, who stated that Väyrynen would not be eligible to run as he's involved with two political parties. That was until another curve ball, this time from the Citizen's Party. In early March, the party announced that Paavo Väyrynen, the party's founder and first ever leader had been kicked out of the party.
When this was announced, there were speculations on this being just another plot made by Väyrynen to get attention and admittedly, I was kinda on board with that at first. But then more information came out. The main reason for the party firing Väyrynen was the misuse of party funds and issues with campaign finances during his presidential run. Allegedly Väyrynen had transferred "five digit figures" in party funds to his campaign. Another reason given for the decision to kick him out was his bid for the Center Party leadership. According to the party, Väyrynen had only informed them about his decision to run a mere hour before announcing it publicly, over fears about the way the party would react to it. The Citizen's Party also sent a passive-aggressive message to the Center Party about the fact that they couldn't solve the issue with Väyrynen. The message said that in their mind, the issue was now solved and that the Center Party could now have a clean election to choose the next party leader. Väyrynen on the other hand claimed that during his campaign he had transferred 38 000 Euros as campaign donations and that the money had been loaned to the party by him. So according to him, he was simply using his own money he had loaned to the party. He also considers the board meeting where the decision of kicking him out was made as illegal and therefore not valid. I really don't know what his reasoning there is, but he has gotten some traction for his claims. He challenged the decision and a court decision was made which made the decision void, meaning, at least for now, he's still a party member, until the whole thing can be sorted out. Right now, we can only wait and see how this develops.
Another field there has been development is sote. I've previously made a post about this as well, so I'm not going into detail here. To put it simply, sote is a massive project to reform Finland's healthcare system and social services. The reason for this is the increased pressure towards our public healthcare system, caused by the rapidly aging population, a problem all across the western world. To summarize, the idea is to cut the costs of the system while at the same time guaranteeing access to healthcare for everybody. This has been on the works for a long time, but currently it seems our government is more concerned with achieving their political goals than with actually creating a system that would meet the goals given to this reform.
Now, the specifics are in the post linked above, but to summarize: Currently, healthcare and social services are administrated by the individual municipalities and as a result, the system is really just a collection of different ways to handle this, which makes the system incredibly complex. One of the main ideas with sote, has been to simplify the administration by forming larger zones to handle the administration instead of the individual municipalities. The prime ministers Center Party (boy, we've been talking a lot about these guys haven't we?) has been for years pushing for higher level of regional autonomy and decided to tie this together with sote. The National Coalition, the other main government party on the other hand has been pushing for further privatization of public property and as a result, came up with the "freedom of choice" model, which in practice means a massive privatization of the healthcare system. Thing is, both parties pretty much hate each others ideas on this, but, they came up with a plan. The National Coalition will support the Center Party's push for the new regional government, if the Center in return supports the "freedom of choice" model. Blue Reform, the third coalition partner, is basically just happy to participate and thus, ready to support just about everything the larger parties come up with.
The current situation is that the government is in a hurry to pass this. The first ever regional elections for the new regional government were originally scheduled to be held at the same time with recent presidential election. However, the parliaments constitutional committee deemed the previous proposal for the "freedom of choice" model unconstitutional, which forced the government to re-write the whole thing, causing a delay in plans. Right now, the elections are due to be held in October this year. Bigger reason however, is the next parliamentary election scheduled for April 2019. Essentially, it's a now or never situation. If they can't pass this now, they won't have enough time to come up with a new proposal. Thing is, it's still not clear whether or not this will happen. The new version of the "freedom of choice" model is currently being reviewed by the constitutional committee and there is a good chance the outcome will be the same as last time. Also, opposition for these plans within the government has also increased. In late February, Elina Lepomäki, MP for the National Coalition came out in opposition of the proposed model and announced she would be voting against it, making her the only one to do so. One MP going rogue shouldn't mean that much, but in this case it just might.
Prime minister Juha Sipilä's government was originally formed the Center Party, the National Coalition and the Finns Party, which controlled 124 seats from a total of 200. However, after the political crisis last Summer, which lead to the Finns Party being kicked out of the government and caused the formation of the breakaway faction later know as Blue Reform (more on that here), the governments seat count has gone down to 105. So while Lepomäki is currently the only one to publicly announce her plan to vote against the proposal, just a few more would be enough to prevent this from passing. And as I've said before, there already is vocal criticism of the proposal within the government, with speculations about some of the critics voting against it.
Now, the government just recently presented the parliament with their proposal, so it can still take a while before the actual vote. Prime minister Sipilä has already stated that if the bill doesn't pass, he will resign as prime minister, which would most likely lead to a snap election. Thing is, Sipilä has already used this rhetoric before, never actually following up on his words. Most notably this happened during last years governmental crisis, but even before that he tried using this as a threat to achieve his goals. Unfortunately for him, it doesn't work anymore. People are quite simply fed up with him. Funny coincidence here is that soon after his most recent threat of resigning, polls began showing that for the first time in a long time, the Social Democrats, currently the largest opposition party, had the strongest support. This is just one more sign why the government has to pass this bill now: because of their actions, it will be pretty much impossible for a similar right wing government to be formed after the next election. So it really is now or never. Who knows what will happen after the next election, but we can be sure it will be different.
So there you have it. Even though Finland is mostly a pretty stable country, our politics does have some serious drama. Turn out that politics can be messy, no matter how together your country may be.
And once again, feel free to follow me on Twitter. Even if I'm not too active here, I post stuff there pretty much on a daily basis. I'm hoping to get back to more frequent posts, but considering it took me a week from starting this post to actually finishing it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Posts regarding the presidential election
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/election-time-in-finland.html
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/conscription-debate-and-election.html
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/finnish-election-heating-up.html
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/election-results-what-do-they-tell-us.html
First, let's start with Paavo Väyrynen. You may remember that he was one of the candidates in the recent presidential election, and that in my posts about the election, I gave him some special attention (links at the end). The reason is pretty much the outcome of the election. Since it was pretty clear from the beginning that president Sauli Niinistö would win re-election, the election lacked that sense of heightened emotion seen for example in the 2016 US election. Instead, the more interesting competition was between Väyrynen and the Center Party candidate Matti Vanhanen. I went into greater detail about this in a previous posts. In summary, Väyrynen is a veteran politician and has been a member of the Center Party for his whole political career. He's actually a former party leader and is considered the party's honorary chairperson. However, in 2016, he founded his own political party called the Citizen's Party, while also refusing to resign from the Center Party. Problem here is that the Center Party's rules prevent the party leadership from kicking out individual members. Instead, members have to be kicked out by the various member organizations, mostly meaning the local party branches. However, Väyrynen just happens to be the leader and the founder of the branch he's a member of and understandably, the idea of kicking out your leader is somewhat problematic. So essentially, the only way for the party to get rid of Väyrynen, would be to sever ties with one of its local branches, something that they don't seem willing to do. Basically, Väyrynen has been a thorn in the party's flesh for a while now, so the idea of him beating their candidate in the election could be considered a slap in the face.
Since 2014, Väyrynen has been serving in the European parliament, however, he was elected to the Finnish parliament in 2015. However, he chose to not take his seat because he didn't get a position in the cabinet. His seat was taken over by Mikko Kärnä, a man, with whom I actually had a short exchange on Twitter regarding conscription (because of course I've challenged MP's on this issue, what did you expect?). However, during the presidential election, Väyrynen stated that if he doesn't win the presidency (which, as stated before, didn't happen), he would leave the European parliament and return to the Finnish parliament. Naturally, he would be representing the Citizen's Party and stay in the opposition. He has also been nominated as the party's candidate for prime minister in the 2019 election. Originally his return to parliament was due to happen sometime during the Spring, but shortly after the election he threw a curve ball: he would be running for the Center Party's leadership in the 2018 party convention, scheduled for early June and that his return to national politics would be delayed until that. He claimed that this would be his last effort to "save" the party, which he sees as having lost its roots and if he failed, he would resign from the party and focus on leading the Citizen's Party in the 2019 election. Understandably, lot of people thought he had to have some other reasons for this decision. I mean, he had already promised to make a return to national politics as a representative of the Citizen's Party and was considered their candidate for prime minister in the next election. Lot of people, myself included, kinda saw this as a publicity stunt. Essentially the idea was that he wasn't really trying to win. He was just trying to get attention in order to get a head start on the Citizen's Party's 2019 election campaign. And in a way, it did work. This whole thing was all over the news. The Center Party went into a bit of a panic and was trying to prevent Väyrynen from running. The party consulted some legal experts, who stated that Väyrynen would not be eligible to run as he's involved with two political parties. That was until another curve ball, this time from the Citizen's Party. In early March, the party announced that Paavo Väyrynen, the party's founder and first ever leader had been kicked out of the party.
When this was announced, there were speculations on this being just another plot made by Väyrynen to get attention and admittedly, I was kinda on board with that at first. But then more information came out. The main reason for the party firing Väyrynen was the misuse of party funds and issues with campaign finances during his presidential run. Allegedly Väyrynen had transferred "five digit figures" in party funds to his campaign. Another reason given for the decision to kick him out was his bid for the Center Party leadership. According to the party, Väyrynen had only informed them about his decision to run a mere hour before announcing it publicly, over fears about the way the party would react to it. The Citizen's Party also sent a passive-aggressive message to the Center Party about the fact that they couldn't solve the issue with Väyrynen. The message said that in their mind, the issue was now solved and that the Center Party could now have a clean election to choose the next party leader. Väyrynen on the other hand claimed that during his campaign he had transferred 38 000 Euros as campaign donations and that the money had been loaned to the party by him. So according to him, he was simply using his own money he had loaned to the party. He also considers the board meeting where the decision of kicking him out was made as illegal and therefore not valid. I really don't know what his reasoning there is, but he has gotten some traction for his claims. He challenged the decision and a court decision was made which made the decision void, meaning, at least for now, he's still a party member, until the whole thing can be sorted out. Right now, we can only wait and see how this develops.
Another field there has been development is sote. I've previously made a post about this as well, so I'm not going into detail here. To put it simply, sote is a massive project to reform Finland's healthcare system and social services. The reason for this is the increased pressure towards our public healthcare system, caused by the rapidly aging population, a problem all across the western world. To summarize, the idea is to cut the costs of the system while at the same time guaranteeing access to healthcare for everybody. This has been on the works for a long time, but currently it seems our government is more concerned with achieving their political goals than with actually creating a system that would meet the goals given to this reform.
Now, the specifics are in the post linked above, but to summarize: Currently, healthcare and social services are administrated by the individual municipalities and as a result, the system is really just a collection of different ways to handle this, which makes the system incredibly complex. One of the main ideas with sote, has been to simplify the administration by forming larger zones to handle the administration instead of the individual municipalities. The prime ministers Center Party (boy, we've been talking a lot about these guys haven't we?) has been for years pushing for higher level of regional autonomy and decided to tie this together with sote. The National Coalition, the other main government party on the other hand has been pushing for further privatization of public property and as a result, came up with the "freedom of choice" model, which in practice means a massive privatization of the healthcare system. Thing is, both parties pretty much hate each others ideas on this, but, they came up with a plan. The National Coalition will support the Center Party's push for the new regional government, if the Center in return supports the "freedom of choice" model. Blue Reform, the third coalition partner, is basically just happy to participate and thus, ready to support just about everything the larger parties come up with.
The current situation is that the government is in a hurry to pass this. The first ever regional elections for the new regional government were originally scheduled to be held at the same time with recent presidential election. However, the parliaments constitutional committee deemed the previous proposal for the "freedom of choice" model unconstitutional, which forced the government to re-write the whole thing, causing a delay in plans. Right now, the elections are due to be held in October this year. Bigger reason however, is the next parliamentary election scheduled for April 2019. Essentially, it's a now or never situation. If they can't pass this now, they won't have enough time to come up with a new proposal. Thing is, it's still not clear whether or not this will happen. The new version of the "freedom of choice" model is currently being reviewed by the constitutional committee and there is a good chance the outcome will be the same as last time. Also, opposition for these plans within the government has also increased. In late February, Elina Lepomäki, MP for the National Coalition came out in opposition of the proposed model and announced she would be voting against it, making her the only one to do so. One MP going rogue shouldn't mean that much, but in this case it just might.
Prime minister Juha Sipilä's government was originally formed the Center Party, the National Coalition and the Finns Party, which controlled 124 seats from a total of 200. However, after the political crisis last Summer, which lead to the Finns Party being kicked out of the government and caused the formation of the breakaway faction later know as Blue Reform (more on that here), the governments seat count has gone down to 105. So while Lepomäki is currently the only one to publicly announce her plan to vote against the proposal, just a few more would be enough to prevent this from passing. And as I've said before, there already is vocal criticism of the proposal within the government, with speculations about some of the critics voting against it.
Now, the government just recently presented the parliament with their proposal, so it can still take a while before the actual vote. Prime minister Sipilä has already stated that if the bill doesn't pass, he will resign as prime minister, which would most likely lead to a snap election. Thing is, Sipilä has already used this rhetoric before, never actually following up on his words. Most notably this happened during last years governmental crisis, but even before that he tried using this as a threat to achieve his goals. Unfortunately for him, it doesn't work anymore. People are quite simply fed up with him. Funny coincidence here is that soon after his most recent threat of resigning, polls began showing that for the first time in a long time, the Social Democrats, currently the largest opposition party, had the strongest support. This is just one more sign why the government has to pass this bill now: because of their actions, it will be pretty much impossible for a similar right wing government to be formed after the next election. So it really is now or never. Who knows what will happen after the next election, but we can be sure it will be different.
So there you have it. Even though Finland is mostly a pretty stable country, our politics does have some serious drama. Turn out that politics can be messy, no matter how together your country may be.
And once again, feel free to follow me on Twitter. Even if I'm not too active here, I post stuff there pretty much on a daily basis. I'm hoping to get back to more frequent posts, but considering it took me a week from starting this post to actually finishing it, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Posts regarding the presidential election
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/election-time-in-finland.html
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/conscription-debate-and-election.html
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/finnish-election-heating-up.html
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2018/01/election-results-what-do-they-tell-us.html
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