EP213 · Society · first published 2023-09-29
The negotiating president | Pekka Haavisto | Negotiator 213
Presidential candidate Pekka Haavisto joins Sami Miettinen in September 2023, four months before the election. The spine of the episode is four negotiating theses Haavisto formulated out of the Darfur peace talks: giving space and listening with the other side, directness even about genocide, consistent truthfulness with no separate story for each party, and the rule that a warning must be carried out. Around them sit the good cop / bad cop arrangement of the NATO process with Turkey and Hungary, the question of what diplomacy can still do inside a war, and a critique of Africa policy that lands on Europe. This is a candidate interview during a campaign, which is disclosed. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.
The negotiating president | Pekka Haavisto | Negotiator 213
Summary: Presidential candidate Pekka Haavisto joins Sami Miettinen in September 2023, four months before the election. The spine of the episode is four negotiating theses Haavisto formulated out of the Darfur peace talks: giving space and listening with the other side, directness even about genocide, consistent truthfulness with no separate story for each party, and the rule that a warning must be carried out. Around them sit the good cop / bad cop arrangement of the NATO process with Turkey and Hungary, the question of what diplomacy can still do inside a war, and a critique of Africa policy that lands on Europe. This is a candidate interview during a campaign, which is disclosed. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.
Guest, setting and source notes
Pekka Haavisto is a long-serving Finnish foreign minister, UN peace mediator and former environment minister. The recording is 27 September 2023 — roughly four months before the January 2024 presidential election, which he ultimately lost in the second round.
Four disclosures, better made in advance:
- This is a candidate interview during a campaign. Haavisto speaks here as a presidential candidate. That does not make his experience less interesting, but it changes how his forward-looking statements should be read.
- Host and guest know each other professionally. Haavisto’s negotiating theses were published in Sami Miettinen’s book Uusi neuvotteluvalta (WSOY), and the episode returns to them. The connection is stated in the episode itself.
- The episode is from September 2023. The picture of the war in Ukraine, the events in Nagorno-Karabakh, Sweden’s NATO process and the energy investments are that moment’s information. They are kept because the reasoning depends on them — but they are not current.
- There is no publisher caption track for this episode, so this article is based on YouTube auto-captioning. No verbatim quotation is used, and the passages were cross-read against the episode’s own chapter list.
This article weights the episode’s negotiation content and treats the day-politics passages more briefly. That is deliberate: the theses are testable and generalisable; campaign-period situation assessments are no longer either.
1. Four negotiating theses
This is the most valuable part of the episode, and it survives being lifted out of its context. Haavisto formulated the theses out of the Darfur peace talks — Darfur is a province of Sudan roughly the size of France — but they are not development-aid specialism. They are negotiation theory written out of situations where the price of failure is measured in lives.
Thesis 1: Give space, and listen with the other side
Haavisto’s observation is that the movement is in the second half of the sentence. The other party typically opens with “I have always held this view” — and then continues “but this time I could make the following compromise”. If you do not listen as far as the compromise, you miss the one part that moved.
To this he attaches a term he openly says he is not sure exists: myötäkuuntelu — listening with rather than listening to. It is not a technique but a change of position: you set aside your own premises for a moment and enter the same conflict through the other side’s viewpoint and the other side’s story. Only afterwards do you return to what you yourself know about the conflict.
The difference from ordinary “active listening” is substantive rather than semantic: active listening is a way of making the other party feel heard. This is a method by which the listener changes their own picture of the situation.
Thesis 2: Be direct about what the other side does not want to hear
This is the hardest of the theses, and Haavisto gives an example that makes it concrete. He describes telling a Somali leader close to al-Shabaab, directly, that human rights were being violated in his area so flagrantly that nobody wanted to see him at a negotiating table.
The argument is not moral but instrumental: if the atrocities go unsaid, the negotiation is built on information both parties know to be false. An agreement like that does not hold. Haavisto calls this radical truthfulness.
Thesis 3: Surprise positively, through consistent truthfulness
This is the most counter-intuitive thesis, and its logic is game-theoretic.
In a peace negotiation nobody assumes anyone is telling the truth. Everyone assumes there is a manoeuvre behind it and that the other side is playing an angle. That is precisely why speaking straight is a surprise weapon: it is the one move the other side’s model does not anticipate.
The practical rule is hard and checkable: you do not tell different parties different stories. Tactical double messaging is close to standard in mediation, and it is also the thing that, when discovered, ends a mediator’s career.
Haavisto sums this up as talking between adults about real things, without waffle and without invented stories — and adds himself that it can be dangerous.
Thesis 4: Warnings must be carried out
The simplest of the four and the most often broken: if you say you will leave the negotiation should something happen, you must leave. If you issue an ultimatum, you must execute it. If you say you will break off, break off.
Haavisto concedes it has to be done sometimes, and that it is an extreme moment. His conclusion is not that one should threaten more boldly but the opposite: do not say what you do not intend to do. A threat must be backed, or next time nobody has any reason to believe anything you say.
Time limits, emotion and shame
Two further observations that do not fit the theses but belong to the same subject.
A deadline is not always tactics. Classical negotiation teaching says to stop the clock and wait the other side out. Haavisto points out that sometimes the limit is physical: somebody genuinely has to leave by a given hour, and patience will not get you past it.
Shame is present in the room. From the climate negotiations Haavisto remembers a Japanese representative who wept publicly while saying that a six per cent emissions cut would destroy Japan’s economy. Haavisto’s own comment is dry: in hindsight six per cent is a modest figure. But what was present in that moment was not a calculation, it was shame — and shame cannot be negotiated away with numbers.
2. The NATO process: a division of roles, not an accident
The second half of the episode is what Haavisto is best known for, and here he speaks from experience rather than from a programme.
The roles with Turkey. Sami offers the reading that a good cop / bad cop arrangement emerged between Niinistö, Haavisto and Marin in dealing with Erdoğan, possibly with a third, neutral role in it. Haavisto does not dispute the arrangement.
He does correct two things, and they matter more to the episode than the role-play does:
First, the application was not obvious to NATO members. There were central member states that would have preferred not to escalate the situation. Finland had to be able to answer two questions: how it would look after its own defence, and how it would avoid becoming a burden to NATO. A prolonged process was prepared for by seeking separate security assurances from other countries, which were given.
Haavisto marks a disagreement here honestly: the accounts of Mikko Hautala and Risto E. J. Penttilä on how hard the opposition was do not match. In Penttilä’s book it is put almost as a prohibition; on the other account there was no active opposition. Haavisto does not resolve the dispute. That is a mark of source criticism rather than evasion.
Second, Hungary followed Turkey. On Hungary it was fairly clear from the start that the decision would come once Turkey decided. On Turkey, Haavisto says plainly what was long skirted in public: the decision on Finland could have been accelerated had Finland wanted to separate from Sweden quickly. The paths finally diverged in spring 2023 — in his words “softly” — once Sweden’s position grew more complicated with the Quran burnings and securing Finland’s own safety could no longer wait.
Hungary’s own logic. Haavisto describes talks with Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó, and his explanation is historical rather than transactional: Hungary’s experience of 1956 is that nobody came to help. The West made promises, and when the Russian tanks came, no help arrived. On top of that sit Hungary’s energy dependence on Russia and a long dispute over the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine.
This is a good illustration of the first thesis in practice. Hungary’s position is easy to explain purely through the Orbán–Putin relationship; Haavisto additionally brings in the story the Hungarian side tells about itself. That does not make the position right, but it makes it predictable.
An irony of history Haavisto names himself. Finland’s law on breach of the sanctity of religion — a law a friend of individual liberty finds hard to defend — ended up in this process saving Finland and condemning Sweden. He says so straight out and does not try to turn it into merit.
He also brings in the F-16s and the US Senate, where the same human rights debate about Turkey’s Kurdish policy was being had as in Europe — meaning Turkey’s decision was not a bilateral question but part of a larger trade.
3. What diplomacy can still do inside a war
This is the episode’s single most useful breakdown, because it is a list rather than an attitude. Haavisto’s claim is that diplomacy is not dead, and he supports it with cases:
- The grain agreement — negotiated with the help of Turkey and the UN.
- Prisoner exchanges — workers from the Azovstal plant, prisoners of war and fighters have been exchanged. The Red Cross’s assessment at the start of the war was that the situation was chaotic: a prisoner could be exchanged for two bottles of vodka across the line.
- The EU’s own capacity — sanctions decisions, and massive arms support channelled through the European Peace Facility.
Alongside runs Haavisto’s own caveat, which is what makes the list credible: aid fatigue is real. Large numbers of refugees have arrived, the price dumping of grain has hit agricultural incomes in neighbouring countries such as Poland, and things accumulate. One new small thing can break the camel’s back. His image is that the tower sways at times — not that it falls.
4. Russia’s vulnerability and Nagorno-Karabakh
These are the episode’s most forecast-like passages, which is why they should be marked as such.
Haavisto compares Prigozhin’s march on Moscow to the situation of 1917: disappointed soldiers who have suffered under badly led operations are angry. He does not claim the system falls — he says the Soviet Union too collapsed under its own impossibility, and that Finns have historically been skilful at using such edge moments.
On Nagorno-Karabakh his observation follows the first thesis and holds up over time better than any assessment of the balance of forces: he has met representatives of both Azerbaijan and Armenia since the most recent fighting, and what he notes is the language — how each side speaks about the other. That is a mediator’s diagnostic instrument, not an opinion.
5. A critique of Africa policy that lands on Europe
The sharpest single argument in the episode is not about Africa but about Europe’s way of talking about it.
The first observation is linguistic and uncomfortable: a thing is called “African” — not Nigerian, South African, Namibian or Ethiopian. Africa is still thought of as a mass, even though its countries are at very different stages of development.
The second observation is Haavisto’s account of why the Chinese pitch works and the European one does not. The Chinese presentation has three parts, and each answers something the host country itself regards as its problem:
- Is your problem population growth? We have a solution — a population programme.
- Is your problem the economy? We have had steady annual growth of five to seven per cent.
- Is your problem the environment? We have something to offer there too.
The European counterpart is democracy and human rights. Haavisto quotes a formulation he has heard: from the Chinese you get a hospital, from the European a moral sermon.
It matters to read this correctly. Haavisto is not saying democracy should be dropped. He is saying that values talk without investment is not an offer, and that the other party turns their ear to where the offer comes from. That is a structural claim about a competitive situation, and it is checkable.
The same passage holds the episode’s most humble moment. Asked what he has brought home from the world, Haavisto answers with a piece of wisdom an old man once told him: there is no point setting out to export lessons to the world — the world knows how. The practical example is concrete: old local mechanisms exist for settling disputes between villages and regions, and peace is not built on emptiness but on how negotiation was already done there.
6. Energy: when industry and the environmental movement reach the same answer
This section is the episode’s most surprising, because it does not take the expected route.
Nuclear power. Haavisto’s own position is left open in the episode, and he says why: there is a new generation in the Greens that is very positively disposed towards small modular reactors. He does not announce a conversion, but neither does he shut the door. The Rosatom project is for him an example of a mistaken investment.
Wind and solar. Here he is plainly enthusiastic, and the reasoning is local rather than ideological: investment has accelerated since the Russian invasion, and in small municipalities — he mentions Pieksämäki — the atmosphere is dynamic. Solar panels are going up on old peat-cut bogs, and he floats the idea of greenhouses underneath them. He also holds that electricity storage and a two-way grid are arriving: you can sell power back into the network.
SSAB and Raahe. This is the episode’s largest economic figure. By Haavisto’s account the Raahe plant produces about 7 per cent of Finland’s emissions, and an equivalent plant sits in Sweden. The company is weighing which to convert first. The decision is therefore simultaneously a climate decision and an industrial-policy decision, and Finland cannot make it alone.
The conclusion that is most interesting for an article is Haavisto’s own: a strange joint victory for industry and for the environmental movement — which he himself has represented — may be close. He attaches to this a memory of the 1970s, when in his youth it was said that the pollution of nature was a necessary price for the standard of living. That is no longer anyone’s position.
Two things call for reader care: the nuclear position is left open in the episode, and the 7 per cent figure is Haavisto’s, not separately verified in this article.
7. Disagreement, safe space, and the missing agora
The latter part of the episode deals with domestic discussion culture, and two passages survive being lifted out of the campaign context.
Disagreement is useful. Haavisto rejects the idea that Finland is so small a nation that everyone should agree. His reasoning is practical: when there are several positions, one of them happens to be the right one — and which one only becomes clear afterwards. The precondition, however, is a civilised negotiating mechanism, and he reminds the listener that Finnish decision-making — including the agreement systems of the labour market — already has such a tradition. It is not worth throwing in the scrap heap.
Safe space, in both directions. This is the most balanced passage in the episode, and it should be read whole rather than half.
After the murder of the Swedish rapper Einár, Haavisto as foreign minister convened a discussion that brought together Finnish rappers, representatives of kids who hang around railway stations, police, youth workers and people with lived experience. Afterwards one young man came to thank him for having made a safe space for the conversation — the young man said he had never been able to talk about these things at home, at school, with friends, and certainly not on social media.
And then Haavisto does what is rarely done in this debate: he names the concept’s danger. Some use “safe space” as a duty to yield — such that when the person with the most acute experience speaks, everyone else must refrain from commenting. That, he says, has its own risks. His own definition is different: safety includes listening with the other person, the same skill as in the first negotiating thesis. A space is safe when people listen to each other — not when some of them fall silent.
The missing agora. Haavisto regards social media as a poor substitute for a public square. He is on TikTok himself and notes that the comment section there is shaped differently from X — the extremes distribute differently. But his confidence is in meeting in person, not in the platform.
8. A view of the presidency: Ståhlberg, Paasikivi, Ryti — and Kofi Annan
Asked about Finland’s best presidents, Haavisto’s choices say something about what he takes the core of the office to be, and they are all examples of sacrifice rather than success.
- K. J. Ståhlberg — in 1930 the retired president was abducted and driven towards the eastern border. Haavisto’s emphasis is that he fought for his own view.
- J. K. Paasikivi — Haavisto’s remark is literary: the diaries are good, and the man had command of the written word.
- Risto Ryti — during the Continuation War Hitler demanded what amounted to Finland’s binding commitment to the Axis, and the president made the commitment in his own name, so that it lapsed with him. In Haavisto’s reading that is an example of a head of state’s task being to take the consequence onto himself.
Among international figures he names Kofi Annan, whose support he had at the UN across six years of investigating conflict zones and the environmental damage of war. The characterisation is courage between great powers — and he adds the realistic observation that the UN is now in considerable difficulty because of the situation in Ukraine.
Åland is the episode’s last and least noticed lesson in negotiation. The League of Nations awarded Åland to Finland, and in the formal NATO negotiations in Brussels Åland’s representation was included in the delegation. Haavisto’s point is not about speaking turns but about presence: a party that is at the table is a different thing from a party that is talked about.
That is the whole episode compressed into one practical decision.