EP180 · Society · first published 2023-03-09
The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Negotiator 180
Two parliamentary candidates from Uusimaa, Tere Sammallahti (National Coalition, 78) and Onni Rostila (Finns Party, 341), in the format of Ivan Puopolo's satire show a month before Finland's 2023 election. Subjects include Estonia's election result and its 21 per cent flat tax, the size of the public sector, the adjustment list the finance ministry's budget chief took public, the equality ombudsman's opinion on a school assignment in Salo — which Rostila answers as a lawyer by pointing to the absence of any weighing of fundamental rights — and campaign ethics, where both had signs torn down and Sammallahti describes his team putting competing parties' signs back up. All positions belong to the guests. Published 9 March 2023.
The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila
Summary: In episode 180 Sami Miettinen interviews two parliamentary candidates from Uusimaa: Tere Sammallahti (National Coalition Party, number 78) and Onni Rostila (Finns Party, number 341). It was recorded in the studio of Ivan Puopolo’s Viikon viisastelu and in its format — the joke being that an “election quarantine” would have required a left-winger in the studio, and today there are only “positive right-wing atoms”. Every position in the episode belongs to the guests and the host; this article does not endorse them. Published 9 March 2023, about a month before Finland’s 2023 parliamentary election.
The format: a hijacked satire show
The episode opens on its framing joke. Ivan Puopolo’s Viikon viisastelu has been “hijacked”, and Miettinen explains that Puopolo had been asked to observe an election quarantine: the studio may not hold only left-wingers or only right-wingers, or the universe breaks. Antimatter and matter have to be combined to produce zero debate. Today there is only one kind present.
The format includes a karaoke corner, opened with Iron Maiden’s The Prisoner — from the 1970s series in which people were abducted to a prison island and tried to escape. Miettinen finds it apt: the escape should be by way of an election. A later corner is filled by Käärijä.
Estonia as the comparison
The first subject is Estonia’s just-held election, whose result Sammallahti calls remarkable: a hundred-seat parliament, in his telling a liberal government, and eight seats for the social democrats. The anchor point of the discussion is the 21 per cent flat tax and the fact that Estonians are debating whether even that is too much.
The guests’ argument is cultural and institutional. Sammallahti says Estonians like the freedom they have — low taxes, little regulation, a nimble state administration — and that in the run-up to the election he receives messages from Finnish entrepreneurs who have moved their businesses to Estonia and do not feel able to come back. In his view, Eastern Europe does not hold the Finnish debate about whether the total tax rate should rise six percentage points so that the country could become “a real welfare state”.
Rostila adds his own angle: Estonia got an effective inoculation against socialism from the Soviet period, whereas Finland, in his view, has been desensitised and conditioned to tolerate a creeping rise in the tax rate. He uses the word lustration — cutting short the political careers of the worst actors, or at least questioning their motives — and Sammallahti notes that across Europe such an inoculation has generally cost a large part of a generation.
Progression gets the episode’s most precise counter-argument. Rostila points out the basic fact he says gets forgotten: under a flat tax too, someone earning ten times as much pays ten times as much tax. Miettinen does the arithmetic: under Finland’s progression the ratio would be roughly thirty. Rostila’s conclusion is that work has been assigned the logic of a corrective tax — the most productive people’s work is taxed the most.
Asked whether Estonia has Finns Party-like elements, the answer is careful: the guest has not followed EKRE closely, but judges that Estonia has managed to be unapologetically nationalist without the same impulse towards self-flagellation.
The size of the public sector
The most structural part of the conversation concerns the public sector. Sammallahti argues Estonia benefited from never having developed a massive permanent state apparatus, and describes Finland’s public sector as having swollen to the point where it harms competitiveness, with no room for tax cuts because borrowing is already heavy.
From this comes the episode’s most memorable comparison, which its author flags as crude: the public sector is like body fat percentage — some is fine, but past morbid obesity your capacity and health fail, and by then losing the fat and giving up the treats is far harder.
The preferred government, and the politics of debt
Miettinen raises an EVA survey in which the most popular coalition for the next term would be the Finns Party and the National Coalition, and asks whether the public is right. Rostila’s answer is that this is not quite the point: his reading is that people have been woken up because the borrowing has been exceptional. Sammallahti agrees a sense of crisis has emerged but regrets that it is arriving 30 to 40 years late.
Both return to the 2007 election and the “Sari the Nurse” auction, in which parties competed over who promised the larger spending increases — and which was followed by the financial crisis. What Sammallahti finds most striking is that the deficit then became chronic at 11 to 12 billion, which in his view Covid and the war do not explain.
Miettinen adds a media criticism: if the debate is always framed as how many billions are to be distributed, the sign is never flipped to how many are to be taken away.
As an aside, Miettinen concedes losing his own argument about Sweden’s Covid policy: two friends sent him an excess mortality table in which Anders Tegnell’s Sweden was lowest. “Tegnell was right after all.”
The finance ministry’s list
The most concrete fiscal passage concerns the adjustment list that the finance ministry’s budget chief Mika Niemelä took public — in Miettinen’s words a “boss move”, the ministry going over the ministers’ heads. The barb Miettinen quotes: “You have given us a billion reasons for this work.”
The guests’ reading of the ministry’s message is one of the episode’s clearest claims: Finns, right up to the level of their political decision-makers, have been misled into believing their standard of living is higher than it is — and there is no money for a public sector this large, which is where the borrowing comes from.
Sammallahti defends the list as proper civil service work: this is exactly how a ministry should behave, putting a tray of options in front of politicians. His own proposal is that as prime minister he would ask the ministry for an even longer list, take the group into a situation room, draw a line under eight or ten billion, and not leave the room until the number was met.
On specific measures the guests mention staggering or cutting earnings-related unemployment benefit to 180 days, lightening dismissal protection, examining the tax exemption of the trade union movement and large foundations, unifying VAT rates, and looking towards Estonia. On the Denmark comparison they make the same point twice: when the left invokes Denmark’s high tax rate or its labour market model, the single 25 per cent VAT rate and the removal of dismissal protection and the loosening of universal applicability are not part of the package.
The business figure Miettinen raises is that around 15 per cent of employing companies ceased operations the previous year, on a continuously declining trend. Sammallahti’s conclusion is that those suited to entrepreneurship should be allowed to employ those who are not.
The guests are incredulous at the social democrats’ line: Antti Rinne’s diabetes calculation on A-studio, and the idea of borrowing for another fifteen years for investments that would then cure the deficit, draw both mockery and a complaint that the media has not challenged it.
Free speech corner: the equality ombudsman’s opinion
The second half opens with a case in which a school assignment in Salo had stated that there are two sexes, which school staff reported to the equality ombudsman. The guests read the resulting opinion as holding that the Equality Act requires such dissenting voices to be silenced and obliges intervention in harassment and discriminatory behaviour.
Miettinen’s question is a matter of principle and is put conditionally: since when is a student reported to an authority for a wrong exam answer — even supposing it were wrong, which in his view it is not?
Rostila contributes the episode’s weightiest single passage, and he speaks specifically as a lawyer. His concern is the drift of legal interpretation away from the preparatory works: if the Equality Act is read so that a primary-school pupil’s factually correct observation can be rejected, the interpretation is far from what the legislator intended. His second and, in his view, more serious concern is the absence of any weighing of fundamental rights: the expanding interpretation of the Equality and Non-Discrimination Acts starts to run on its own logic, and the opinion says nothing about how it relates to freedom of expression as protected by the constitution.
Sammallahti’s proposal is administrative: the non-discrimination ombudsman’s office could be closed and its functions folded into the equality ombudsman’s, with the necessary legislative changes and a significant cut in resources.
The guests continue the theme with the claim that activism has infiltrated institutions: gender studies graduates recruited into agencies, some teachers acting as informants, and authorities repeating the same line. Criticism also lands on a photograph posted by equality minister Thomas Blomqvist of a Finnish delegation at the UN, whose benefit to the taxpayer Sammallahti describes as exactly zero. These are the guests’ views and are not verified here.
Double standards and the Lintilä case
The satire show’s standing double-standard angle here falls on two ministers. On one side, prime minister Sanna Marin’s partying, which in the guests’ view the Eurovision song and public coverage romanticise; on the other, economic affairs minister Mika Lintilä, about whom rumours are circulating.
The distinction is drawn by Rostila, and it is the episode’s most balanced moment: Marin’s cases happened largely on her own time, whereas Lintilä is suspected in connection with official duties — but cutting the other way, Marin’s cases were publicly evidenced, while Lintilä is accused on the basis of anonymous rumour. His sympathies are moving towards Lintilä, because no evidence has been presented that alcohol impaired the handling of his duties.
The conversation moves to the Centre Party’s internal situation. The guests’ reading is that a month before the election the party’s entire public attention is going into internal backstabbing, and that the WhatsApp affair began with someone leaking a message from the party’s own group. Sammallahti’s campaign observation is general: if a community looks deeply quarrelsome from outside, few want to join it. Speculation about who was behind the leak is the guests’ own and is not repeated here by name.
Election sabotage and campaign ethics
The best passage in the closing stretch is practical and unusually conciliatory. Both say their roadside campaign signs had been torn down in the campaign’s first days — for one of them the news arrived from his support team just before recording began.
Sammallahti describes the mechanism that makes sabotage tempting: the closer the election day, the more uncertain every candidate becomes, including those who have served several terms, and at that point bad ideas start to look good. His own line is unambiguous: he has had to tell his own campaign team that no sabotage happens under any circumstances, and his team has put back up countless signs belonging to competing parties’ candidates, knocked over by ploughs, wind and frost.
Around this is built the episode’s most transferable idea, and it is about trust rather than politics: once people start wondering whether they can say what they actually think, soon nothing gets said — and that makes all political cooperation harder. Sammallahti cites his own case, in which messages from his council group reached the press.
On the Uusimaa constituency the guests note that the pot is so large that many get through, so there is less of a pure zero-sum contest within a list than in smaller districts — though it is a shark pool all the same.
Campaign speeches
The episode ends with each guest giving a short campaign speech. Miettinen offers his own recommendation on the grounds that you can have a genuinely direct conversation with both and still enjoy it, and hopes that carries into parliament.
Onni Rostila (341, Finns Party, Uusimaa) presents himself as clearly the youngest candidate on his list, with a lawyer’s background suited to legislative work, and describes himself as a solidly right-wing Finns Party candidate and value conservative who would gladly enter a centre-right coalition.
Tere Sammallahti (78, National Coalition, Uusimaa) concedes that his social media irritates many, and claims to be approachable in person and able to discuss anything reasonably. His own theme is a politician’s independence: both of them have a profession they can sell in the private sector, so neither needs politics for the money, and failing to be elected would not leave them with nothing. He would like parliament to have more understanding of ordinary working life, accountability for results, and an entrepreneurial attitude.
Rostila’s addition is the closing distillation: you have to stand behind the things that brought you into politics, but also be able to justify them — and because politics after an election is negotiation, negotiating skill is the cornerstone of doing politics.
A note on the source
The episode was transcribed with MacWhisper and the transcript carries no speaker labels. With two guests, named attributions rest on direct evidence in the transcript — being addressed by name, a candidate number, a profession (lawyer) or an office (the National Coalition council group in Espoo). Passages where the speaker cannot be identified with certainty are described without a name. There are no gaps in the transcription.
This is a campaign-period conversation in which two candidates set out political views. This article reports them as they were stated and does not present them as statements of fact. Where the episode speculates about named individuals’ motives or makes unverified claims, that is described as speculation or not repeated.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Varjoviisasteluklubi oikeistokaappaus | Tere Sammallahti Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180.