Election update

Well, it wasn't my plan to stay away this long, but since I don't get paid for writing... Well I have more important things to do. That being said, since the Finnish election is only 6 days away I'd say it's time to take a look at recent events.

The first thing we have to talk about is the resignation of prime minister Juha Sipilä. On the 8th of March 2019, pretty much exactly a month ago to the hour, from the moment I'm writing this sentence, prime minister Sipilä announced that he would resign because his government couldn't get it's most important piece of legislation through.  Namely, this was the sote-reform, about which I've talked about in an earlier post. Like I mentioned in that post, the governments proposal had encountered numerous problems with the constitution, which meant that the bill had to be revised multiple times and this is why they failed to pass it. The government ran out of time. They tried to the last minute to push this through, even resorting to some very questionable tactics to get the bill through the committees so parliament could vote on it. Sipilä had actually promised he would resign if the reform didn't pass, so when it became clear that the reform wouldn't get a vote in parliament, he stayed true to his words and resigned.

That being said, this didn't really have any practical effect. The election date was already set on the 14th of April and the parliament was originally scheduled to hold it's final session before the election on the 15th of March, though this was ultimately delayed by few days. Also, the 5th of March was the deadline for nominating candidates. Also, Sipilä still remains prime minister as his administration was turned into a caretaker government, meaning they can't make any political decisions, instead only handling the absolutely necessary government functions. So, what was the point here?

Quite simply, this seems to be an attempt to gain political points. In recent polls the governments total support has only been a little over 30%. Of course, lot of this has to do with the Blue Reform, a situation I explained in a previous post. However, apart from this, Sipilä's Center Party has also been losing support. In the most recent poll published by YLE, the Center was polling at 14.4%. Compare that to the 2015 election when the party received 21.1% of the vote. That's a 7% drop. These are historically low numbers for the party. They are seemingly heading towards a massive loss in the upcoming election. Since he promised he would resign if sote didn't pass, Sipilä has now portrayed his resignation as him "taking responsibility" for the failure to pass sote and standing behind his words. Let's just say this really hasn't worked.

There's also bit of an update on things I said in my post about Blue Reform. In the post I speculated whether or not Timo Soini, the foreign minister of the current caretaker government and the former leader of the Finns party would run in the election. Well, the answer is no, he's not running. This is a major blow for the party, considering their poor performance in polls. Recently, a poll by YLE showed the party's support at 0.9%, which is literally within the margin of error. The party needed every candidate they can find just to stay in parliament and as a result, loosing Soini was a major blow.

So, why was Soini so important? Quite simply, he most likely would have been the party's best candidate to capture a seat. I mean, think about the man's political history: he was one of the founders of the Finns Party, led the party from 1997 to 2017. During this time, he turned the party from a minor party within parliament with only 5 seats after the 2007 election to a major player with 39 seats in 2011, making it the 3rd largest party in parliament. In 2015, the party lost one seat but ended up as the 2nd largest party. Then there's his personal vote count: in 2011 he had the highest individual vote count for any candidate with 43 437 votes, while in 2015 he got 29 527 votes and had the second highest individual vote count. No matter what you think about his policies (personally, I'm not a fan), the man is clearly an excellent campaigner and a successful politician. Now, considering Blue Reforms support literally fits the margin of error, a candidate like Soini could have given a huge boost to the party's campaign.

That being said, I still stand behind my words in the previous post about this group: they have a chance to surprise. They certainly won't be a major player after the election and the party seems to understand that, as they have set their goals to getting five seats in parliament, compared to the 17 seats they held before the election. I personally do see this as bit too optimistic for them considering the poor performance in polls. That still doesn't change the fact that compared to other small parties which are running, they have one thing on their side: name recognition. After all, despite losing Soini, they are running multiple government ministers and other experienced politicians. As an example the current minister of defense Jussi Niinistö is one of their candidates and despite the clusterfuck that was the formation of this party (explained in the post above), Niinistö himself is still somewhat popular. People seem generally happy with his work as minister, including people who fucking despise the whole Sipilä administration and the Blue Reform as a party.

The fact is, the upcoming election will be interesting.Part of the reason is the fact that number of minor parties actually have a pretty good chance of getting into parliament for the first time. The election is just days away and major surprises are still possible. I'm definitely waiting for the result.