---
title: "The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Negotiator 180"
summary: "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."
datePublished: 2023-03-09
dateModified: 2023-03-09
originalLang: en
section: society
sections: ["society","economy"]
authors: ["Sami Miettinen"]
tags: ["Neuvottelija","EP180","Tere Sammallahti","Onni Rostila","Finnish election 2023","National Coalition","Finns Party","Estonia","Public finances","Free speech","Election campaign","Viisasteluklubi"]
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep180-varjoviisasteluklubi-oikeistokaappaus-sammallahti-rostila/
---
# The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Negotiator 180

# 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI).