EP178 · Society · first published 2023-03-02
Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk | Heikki Pursiainen, Kai Lintunen | Negotiator 178
Two National Coalition candidates a month before Finland's April 2023 parliamentary election: economist Heikki Pursiainen from Helsinki and lawyer-economist Kai Lintunen from Uusimaa. The heaviest part of the episode is a long exchange on constitutional review — why Finland has no constitutional court, why the Constitutional Law Committee speaks in the conditional, and why an individual finds it hard in practice to invoke fundamental rights before a court. Also state ownership from Fortum to Patria, the universal applicability of collective agreements as privatised legislation, and a sharp disagreement about which side of the spectrum fascism and national socialism belong to. Published 2 March 2023.
Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk | Pursiainen, Lintunen
Summary: In episode 178 Sami Miettinen interviews two National Coalition Party candidates, economist Heikki Pursiainen (Helsinki) and lawyer-economist Kai Lintunen (Uusimaa), a month before Finland’s April 2023 parliamentary election. Published 2 March 2023.
A note on reading this. This is an election episode in which two candidates from the same party speak in their own names. The views are theirs, and they are attributed by speaker here. The article takes no position on who is right, and campaign promises and forecasts are marked as forecasts rather than observations. Where the guests disagree with each other or with the interviewer, the disagreement is left visible.
Why to read the middle section first
The weightiest content is not the campaign pitch but a ten-minute exchange on constitutional review (32:33–43:23). It is an unusually concrete explanation of how Finnish fundamental-rights review differs from the model used in most Western countries, and it comes from two people, one of whom studied constitutional law and the other of whom wrote a book about Finnish state-centredness.
The Constitutional Law Committee and the missing court
Miettinen puts the question directly: in Finland members of parliament themselves assess whether laws comply with the constitution, where most Western countries give the job to a constitutional court.
Lintunen’s description of how it works is the bluntest line in the episode. He studied international law, European law and constitutional law, and describes the committee’s practice like this:
These politicians who sit on the Constitutional Law Committee promise that they are not wearing the politician’s hat at all in that committee room — and the moment they step out, they can politick away. This is perfect political theatre, as everyone understands.
His explanation for why there is no court is historical: Finland did not want a powerful tribunal steering political content or political values.
Pursiainen’s criticism is different and more precise. He does not oppose ex ante review as such — it is good that parliament has its own mechanism for checking that legislation complies with the constitution. The problem is what it reviews:
The work of the Constitutional Law Committee is so very abstract and far from people’s lives. Something could happen, it could turn out that — the conditional is the verb form used in there.
This is the single best observation in the episode. The committee assesses a bill abstractly and in advance: could this infringe someone’s rights. What Pursiainen wants is concrete review after the fact — that an individual could say that this law or this administrative act infringes this particular right of mine, and have it examined. A court would then also have to weigh competing rights against one another far more concretely than the committee does now.
Lintunen fairly objects that fundamental rights can be invoked in Finland: the constitution is applicable law and courts do apply it. Pursiainen does not dispute that but moves the question to practice — it happens very rarely, because Finland lacks a long history of application in which people have grown used to doing it. Miettinen backs this with a report produced at Libera.
Neither guest demonises the American comparison. Miettinen raises the usual objection that the Supreme Court is politicised because the president appoints the justices. Pursiainen’s answer inverts the framing: the American problem is not the court but that legislation does not work. Abortion is his example of a question the political system has been incapable of settling politically, which is why it ended up with the court.
Universal applicability: one Coalition candidate defends it, the other criticises it
This is the best disagreement in the episode, because it runs inside the party.
Miettinen states his position sharply: the universal applicability of collective agreements violates freedom of contract and is a tyranny of the minority. He also describes the mechanism for seeking an exemption — the board for confirming the universal applicability of collective agreements — which he calls a corporatist special-statute unit.
Lintunen, the party’s lawyer candidate, does not go along. His answer is procedural rather than substantive: it is not so simple that the rule is unlawful and must therefore be destroyed wholesale. Society is developed through law and through reason, not by throwing arguments of that kind around.
Pursiainen’s position is a third one, and the most interesting. He separates two things that usually get conflated in this debate:
- Is it unconstitutional? He suspects it may well be a perfectly lawful arrangement constitutionally — the Finnish constitution is not a doctrinally pure collection of liberal social theory.
- Is it consistent with liberal theory? No. It is privatised legislation, which comes not from democratic legislative bodies but through the power of organisations.
And then he makes a move worth reading twice. Taking the forest industry’s withdrawal from the system as his example, he says he agrees with Lintunen: the system has precisely not been developed through law; dissatisfaction among employers was so great that they set about breaking it by means other than legislation — and that is not right from the point of view of society as a whole. It would be far better to develop it through legislation and political decision-making.
In other words: two candidates who both want more flexible labour markets disagree on the means and agree that the current route is the wrong one.
State ownership: strategic or not
Miettinen asks about the state’s stewardship of Fortum.
Lintunen defends strategic ownership on grounds of geography: Finland is a small state that must look after critical functions — ammunition plants, electricity infrastructure — and at these latitudes a perfect market economy may not be available.
Pursiainen’s answer is short: no, it does not. If a crisis comes, it makes no difference who owns the infrastructure — it will be taken into national control. Fortum’s state ownership, he argues, is a relic of a time when Finland had no capital and state companies were founded for that reason. That justification is gone, and what remains is a listed company in which the state is a poorly diversified owner.
His sharpest distinction: it is one thing for the state to own a hundred per cent of a company performing what is effectively an official function — he accepts Lintunen’s example of Erillisverkot — and quite another for the state to hold a large undiversified stake in a listed company. The latter is bad for the companies and bad for politics.
And then the point that makes the argument interesting rather than predictable — Pursiainen argues against himself:
The only reason really to think the state should be cautious about selling its holdings is that greedy politicians would of course take the proceeds and squander them straight away.
His solution is a transition: the state would move from strategic owner to diversified portfolio owner, so the money would not be poured into a bottomless pit at once.
Miettinen brings in Norway as a comparison, whose holdings of over a trillion are specifically in foreign companies, and likens it to diversifying pension assets: you should not invest your pension money in the company you work for, because a bankruptcy then costs you both the job and the pension.
He also notes that Patria’s partial privatisation happened to go well — the stake went to a Norwegian company in a NATO country and the Nammo joint venture survived — which during the war in Ukraine turned out to be workable.
The disagreement that was not smoothed over: fascism and intellectual history
This passage (23:10–24:36) deserves to be reported as it stands, because it is the one place where the interviewer and a guest disagree directly and sharply.
Miettinen argues that if Mussolini is placed on the right, then Hitler’s national socialism would belong on the left, because companies were nationalised and directed into arms production.
Pursiainen rejects this flatly:
You are simply completely wrong there in terms of intellectual history. That is the sort of thing all the right-wing boys on Twitter repeat, but it is not true. Any serious analysis of intellectual history says that fascism is a movement of the right. National socialism too.
He also says twice that he has no patience for talking about Nazis, and the conversation moves on. Lintunen sits closer to Miettinen here, noting that collective ownership and state companies belong to the left — to which Pursiainen replies that they belong to the authoritarian right as well.
This article does not settle the dispute. It is a question of interpretation in intellectual history, and the reader can see both cases.
Pursiainen’s taxonomy: the right is not one thing
Underneath the disagreement is Pursiainen’s actual claim, and it is the most analytical moment in the episode. The left–right axis does not run along the market-economy or freedom dimension. The right consists of at least three different things:
- right-liberals, who favour markets and individual liberty
- conservatives, who are not typically particular friends of the market economy or individual liberty but think in collectives: nation, family, community
- the authoritarian right, which is wholly collectivist
And from that follows the self-criticism:
The right deceives itself. We think we are somehow automatically on the side of individual liberties.
He adds that he knows plenty of people on the left who are strongly for individual liberties, and plenty on the right who are dodgy in that respect. On his reading the National Coalition Party is, as its name says, a collection of doctrines held together because in a country the size of Finland it is strategically absurd to have more than one party of the right.
There is a related observation about the limits of measurement: Helsingin Sanomat’s election compass placed Pursiainen simultaneously well to the right and as a green liberal, which he shrugs off self-deprecatingly as being “an extremely right-wing green liberal woke.” Lintunen’s version of the same point is more practical: the categorisation depends on which conversation you happen to be in — in a debate about school discipline he was placed straight into the top right corner, though he places himself mildly right on the centre axis.
Why not a liberal party
Miettinen asks about the rise of small parties. Pursiainen’s answer is strategic rather than doctrinal, and it transfers directly to any protest movement:
Ideological purity is very pleasant. But if you want to get something done, then in my analysis it unfortunately does not happen in a small party. What happens instead is that the support fragments.
He judges that a liberal party is not a particular threat to the Coalition — its support concentrates in a few postcodes — though Miettinen points out the risk is a handful of critical seats. The same thought broadens into Pursiainen’s more general criticism of the protest spirit of the age, which is the episode’s cold open:
Where has sensible politics gone — the kind where you form groupings, find the majorities that actually deliver the changes, rather than gathering in some protest-minded conclave and shouting your own truths from the sidelines?
Espoo versus Helsinki
A lighter but characterful stretch, and a good example of two candidates approaching the same subject at different temperatures.
Lintunen (Espoo, ten years on the council) defends separateness with numbers: 8,000 new residents moved to Espoo the previous year against Helsinki’s 4,000. Helsinki has grown shut, the dynamism has moved elsewhere, and Helsinki’s role is no longer to govern Uusimaa from the centre. He also notes that Espoo is the most Coalition-voting city in Finland, and that Espoo has not pushed for a merger with Kauniainen — which he takes as respect for places developing on their own strengths.
Pursiainen first throws a jab — “Espoo isn’t a real city” — and then says something much more interesting: he cannot find any passion in the question.
As easy as it is for me to whip myself into a rage about many things, on this Helsinki–Espoo antagonism I cannot really summon the fire.
His substantive position is that Helsinki has nothing to fear: business that needs a lot of space moves to where there is space, and the cities complement each other. The only genuine difficulty is cooperation on transport and zoning.
What stays with you
Three things.
The conditional is the whole of the constitutional argument. Pursiainen’s point that the committee talks about what could happen captures the difference between abstract ex ante review and concrete ex post review better than a long explanation would. The question is not whether fundamental rights are protected on paper, but whether an individual can actually invoke them.
The intra-party disagreement is the best content in the episode. On universal applicability the party’s lawyer candidate defends deliberation while the economist candidate separates legality from liberal theory — and then arrives at his colleague’s conclusion that the system should be developed by law rather than broken around it.
The right is not one thing, and admitting so is rare in an election episode. Pursiainen’s division into right-liberals, conservatives and the authoritarian right — and his remark that the right deceives itself in thinking it is automatically the party of liberty — is self-criticism one seldom hears during a campaign.