Summary
The truth about “Nojailugate” | Martin Paasi | 368 Neuvottelija. Martin Paasi reflects on his first full year as a Member of Parliament and analyzes Finnish politics and the economic system. Topics include the importance of the market economy, an oversized public sector, and his experiences with parliamentary committee work and political theater. The conversation also digs into how different political narratives take shape and how they’re used in public debate. “Nojailugate” (literally “Leaning-gate” — a mock scandal over a lawmaker caught leaning back) is, in his view, an embarrassment for Finland’s media and Parliament.
Transcript
English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.
00:00 Martin Paasi: Some restless host of the Rahapodi podcast went, back then in the era of negative interest rates, shouting all the way on YLE that we should take out 100 billion in loans. Negative interest rate — so really, invest it in something productive, that is. And that’s how I think about it: let’s make Finland a superpower of entrepreneurship, let’s make everything possible. Then again, under the Marin government it would have just raised the discretionary 20 billion of spending to 80 billion. All right, welcome to the year 2026. With us is Member of Parliament Martin Paasi. Howdy. Howdy. Well, this took off quickly. You’re not the “Tsädäm” guy anymore. Have you given up on that era? Sure I am — didn’t you just say it yourself? No, no, just on my own show. Of course it’s, you know, a registered trademark — there’s something fine about that. It was my third time on Paasipodi in parliament. There’s something fine about going — well, this time
01:03 we came in through the tunnels of the Little Parliament annex, so — don’t go telling that now. Oh right, the Russians are listening. The Russians are listening, or, or maybe Tuomo Pietiläinen is taking notes on the real influencers, um, to put into Helsingin Sanomat’s GDPR register, filing criminal complaints about us. Yeah, let’s actually start right there. So, um, I’ve been following this with interest — how our leading paper, Helsingin Sanomat, did an investigative-journalism, um, exposé, where they concluded that 600 thousand Finns were investigated — that is, among the signatories of citizens’ initiatives that had made it through, an awful lot of right-wing ideas were found. In my view the research method was questionable — essentially digging up people’s political opinions with the consent of the digital surveillance agency’s um, henchmen — but the finding itself is, to me, a fine thing. Well, it does, it does in a way give a little hope that, that, um, this country isn’t completely fire-red through and through, but, but,
02:06 um — but then again it was, all the same, also just as much a bit of a, like, hit job of sorts. I was honestly a bit disappointed in Salla. In Salla Vuorikoski. I’ve considered her a really, like, critical journalist, and, like, someone striving for objectivity and all that, and and, um, and of course, it being her job, she then defended her own work, when she — her team, which had, um, been looking into what various well-known people had voted for when it comes to citizens’ initiatives — like “Elokapina, Extinction Rebellion Finland, must be banned”, this, um, “political strikes must be banned” and other such, like, emotionally charged, like, legislative initiatives. So, well, they did this kind of study and then skewered individual people who are, like,
03:07 somehow in decision-making positions in society and, and who after all quite as citizens taking part in citizens’ initiatives. Not not, say, as the CEO of some big company, or in any capacity other than as a citizen — and that’s really the whole tone of the piece: ‘well, who else did wrong,’ and, and, and Salla then defended the piece on social media for a couple of days, and, um, I was left feeling a bit — I don’t really want to get into that debate now — I was left feeling a bit down about it, honestly. Yeah, and then there were people calling in saying, ‘aren’t you ashamed, acting like some corporate CEO, wanting to shrink YLE.’ I mean, what a radical opinion is that? I genuinely do want to cut the, um, 590 million euro budget of a market-distorting operator handing out free media content — cut it substantially. In my view
04:09 that’s basically a no-brainer. But then, the way people tried to fish out some kind of great sin — one figure apparently made a very priest-like public apology, but, like, hardly anyone else actually caved, and honestly I’m proud of that — good, good, good on those people, that good Finns, just like that. And in my view, this actually revealed that maybe the idea in that left-wing bubble had been that this would get people condemned, and then people who hold the wrong opinions would learn to keep quiet, like, at every political level, so that, you know, if you vote the wrong way, or, um, back the wrong causes, we’ll expose you. So, quite the decent, ‘cultural- revolution’-style leftist attack, um. Well, at least nobody’s been carted off to Inari yet. No, not yet, no. But, um, let’s go through a bit of your first full year in parliament. So, on this — my third episode of Paasipodi — you apparently had Anna Kontula on, so I guess the contrast is a bit different. What’s it
05:09 like — A, interviewing people like that, not on Rahapodi, and B, then being colleagues with them over there in parliament? Well, I’m, I’m, I’m a bit of an odd person in that sense, because I like um, different opinions — and especially when they’re put forward or defended by people who, as a matter of genuine conviction, disagree. So, politics aside, and party politics aside — all these kind of, like, surface-level opinions, those aren’t really that interesting. But then, on the other hand, the kind where people genuinely, strongly believe something — that, to me, and maybe even more so if they strongly disagree — that’s — I have a curious nature, and I respect anyone who has a well-considered opinion at all, whatever that opinion looks like or however it’s shaped. And, and, and Anna — I know her as the chair of the Committee for the Future,
06:10 where I’m also a member myself, and she runs that job very exemplarily, and firmly, and wisely, and smartly. And, um, I got to comment on things for her new book too, which — by the way, it was really done in a very journalistically open way, in that yeah, and she keeps repeating that it’s not — that it’s the journalist’s book, that she hasn’t, in that sense, set any boundaries, or encouraged, or steered it in any way whatsoever, but, um, anyway — it was a good conversation, I’d recommend giving it a listen. We, we sadly got cut off in the middle again. We were just getting to the juicier part, like this communist-versus- market-liberalism divide in the conversation. Hopefully we’ll get back to it, but overall, um,
07:11 um, for people who like people, parliament is actually a pretty good place. Most of the people there are, um, pretty sharp. Then there are some others — you find people who are, you know, kind of fanatics, and with them you basically can’t discuss anything at all, because they’ve already decided you’re wrong, and you’re, you’re basically the devil’s own spawn, and so on. So yeah, you do find maybe about a couple handfuls of those, and then roughly the same number of people whose, like, soul in political life has already burned to ash a long time ago. In other words, who no longer have any kind of their own vision, or sense of what’s better, or how — like, trying to get good things for Finland, good outcomes for Finns — no, you’re just, like, a completely political opportunist at every turn, in every sentence, and, and if you can grab one more crumb of political capital,
08:14 you don’t care one bit if you destroy somebody else’s life. So, so, I mean, they’re basically, like, broken inside. Yeah, you do find people like that. It’s not really about that, though. But most of the people are just exactly as I said — decent. It took me about a year, in a way, to understand — to find in myself — that, okay, that a lot of people here actually do want to genuinely discuss things, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of about it, that you [unclear] come to understand other points of view. Yeah, in this book there was also discussion among other things, about her relationship with Kimmo Kiljunen, who in turn was chair of the Defence Committee, of all things, I believe — which is, in a way, funny because personally I always feel like these Kiljunen- and Kontula-type figures — that Finland is completely missing that ‘lustration’ process — the vetting used to screen out old-regime sympathizers — that could have gotten people like that to shift their outlook a bit and pick up a little
09:19 cognitive dissonance, because, like, basically everywhere else people like this were, at best, removed from office and publicly shamed, I’m not saying I want some kind of pillory, but somehow we missed out on that period when all the normal Western countries went through a kind of burst of self-reflection. But then, as such, when it comes to Anna Kontula, she does, she does reflect on herself pretty — pretty, in my opinion — objectively, extremely honestly, about what she is. So that lustration thing doesn’t necessarily apply, in my opinion, or the need for it doesn’t necessarily apply to her. But, but, I mean, well, it would at least apply to Kimmo Kiljunen. But, but I agree that overall in Finland it would be good to just realize and actually do the work of figuring out that Paavo Lipponen got 3 million euros in pipeline-consulting fees — and, um, has that actually been talked about much? And
10:19 yeah, and then, but I mean, even more so, it’s not really even about, like, Russian influence operations — I’ve had, for example, Esko Aho as a guest, who sat on Sberbank’s board and who’s basically now switched over to building relationships with China instead — smart guy. But, um, somehow, like, it just was never grasped, the sheer, senseless stupidity of Soviet communism, and, in a way, its bleak inhumanity, and, in every way, its complete lack of functionality compared with the market economy and capitalism — somehow that whole thing just never, ever got experienced in Finland. So we still have people today in the media, on the left, who genuinely believe in, say, a planned economy. So it kind of feels like that refreshing cold-water dousing that happened everywhere else through lustration — that has completely passed us by, right up to this day. So, well, I mean, if you think about it — if you follow the public media in Finland, then, then, well, roughly,
11:23 on the surface an outsider could be left with the impression that, that, for Finns it isn’t self-evident that the market economy — the market, the economy — is the very thing that has improved humanity’s well-being the most significantly, and, and improved it overall, full stop, and all the other systems are some kind of something else entirely, and especially planned economies and communism and all the rest — those have left trails of destruction — and, and it’s maybe a bit surprising: you end up having to — and this impression of mine comes from the fact that I feel like I somehow end up, in a way, even in my own role, having to defend something that is self- evident, that’s, like, common knowledge basically everywhere else in the world, pretty much universally known — and I have to say that
12:28 that’s, like, very worrying. And the problem in my case is that, since I wasn’t interested in politics before this, I don’t have that kind of visibility, like, perspective on what this whole business used to be like before. So now I’ve, like, basically stuck my head straight into a wasp’s nest, and it’s a bit hard to say whether this — the number of stings coming my way — is actually normal, since I haven’t done this before. But, but, um, yeah, yeah, I would be um, extremely worried in Finland about the fact that, that, um, everyone can have opinions, but not everyone — not even necessarily half the population — finds it self- evident what actually creates prosperity and well-being. And
13:29 with all its imperfections, it’s nonetheless the market economy that does — and — um — this is, in my opinion, a really strange, strange trait. This is an image that’s just formed. It’s not based on any research or anything. In my opinion, you can clearly see it — um, we have — well, I had this guy, Markus Holm, over from Switzerland, and he, by the way, was praising direct democracy. They had just been voting there on implementing this inheritance tax, and were against it — and there the threshold would have been 50 million francs, only above that would it even have started applying. Whereas here in Finland, the inheritance-tax threshold was just raised from 20 grand to 30 grand. Even that was too much communism for them, apparently. But then he’d calculated that our public sector is 159 billion euros, almost 60% of GDP, and private-sector employees, meanwhile, number just under 2 million — so that works out to 84 thousand euros basically loaded onto the backs, in a sense, of that planned economy of ours, for us,
14:31 for private-sector employees, in a way. And if you compare that to, say, the total wage bill, it’s roughly the same size as all of Finland’s earned income, um, including pensions. So, we have — and somehow the idea that this is totally fine, that there should be even more of it — whether that’s the public sector’s wage bill, or pensions, or social security, or, like, free-of-charge services, subsidized services, national defense — nobody even tries, in any way, to put that into perspective — that in Switzerland that same backpack is half the size of ours. So now that we have this right-wing government, and you came in via roughly the same route as, say, the Defence Minister — an old colleague of mine from RPS days, by the way — Elina Valtonen — and then Ville, well, Foreign Minister, and, um, so, so, ‘Minister of War,’ as it were, Trump-style — and then Ville Valkonen also came in partway through the term. Didn’t you come in after Pekka Toveri? I came in after Toveri — literally following in ‘Comrade’ Toveri’s footsteps there. So you
15:33 came in a bit late to the party, so to speak — so you probably missed the opening celebrations, where the government program was being drafted. So does that affect your — have you have you caught up with my crowd here yet? Well, um, it’s, like, a bad thing in terms of impact to come in mid-term, exactly because, um, for many reasons. One is that, at the start you have very intensive discussions, negotiations, in practice — and in that process you learn, you learn what’s a difficult issue for each governing party, and what the arguments are. So you, you basically get a kind of fast-forward — okay, this is the crowd you’re forming a government with, and, um, and here are the sore spots, and these aren’t sore spots, and these are the things they want, and these work for us, and so on. That’s one thing. Then the second layer is what’s actually been decided overall, because since you were there taking part in making those decisions, and, and creating that government program, then, then, then you don’t necessarily need to read
16:36 the government program cover to cover, because — since you were there in those negotiations, you know what the deal is. Then the third thing is that, when the government program is being negotiated, and so on, then, in there, everyone’s kind of arranging some positions for themselves, um, like, from within their own group and so on — committee seats, that sort of thing. Well, I’m not on a single, like, Finance Committee, any committee dealing with the economy, as a member — instead I sit on all sorts of other committees, which are perfectly good committees too, but it’s clear that when I got to sit in as a substitute on the Finance Committee, it was kind of like, well, okay, now I — now I, like, now I’m among my own people, or rather in my own subject area. Now there’s a lot I can contribute. But, but since I wasn’t there at the start, I didn’t get those seats, and nobody wants to give them up, because they’re, like, important, and a vantage point, and so on. So, um, that’s just kind of how it stays, and, and
17:37 all this leads to you having to come up with your own ways of influencing things. So maybe, actually, let’s take this one thing about committees — um, I thought it was a completely absurd event, this so-called ‘leaning’ — ‘Nojailugate.’ So, um, tell us what happened here with the leaning incident involving Krista Kiuru and your committee. I, I remember — it was, I just, like, woke up one day to, um, this story, and I just had to go write, like, this ridiculous crap myself, that, um, you’re not exactly, like, the furthest thing from someone who harasses women, or leans over them as a tall guy, or however they tried to, like, spin it — I thought it was totally, uh— it wasn’t — Krista made it clear in that piece that, um, actually, Krista backed me up through this whole mess I have to give her credit for that. So, what this was actually about was, we’d been sitting there for 17 hours straight. I mean, 17 hours.
18:40 Mm. Time burned again. Well, that was Krista’s fault, wasn’t it? Well, that burned up a day and a half of the night. If, like, on top of that, you drag things out endlessly — that’s what’s called filibustering. In other words, it’s basically deliberate obstruction in practice — something the opposition can engage in. And, um, I had other committee business and stuff like that, and all this work just got put on hold, and all these things — since I was brand new, I was already pretty stressed to begin with, but, in that sense, I tried, from the substitute’s bench there in the committee, to get things done while I was sitting there on standby, stopping the opposition from marching, so to speak, out in front of the cameras to say ‘we can’t continue this discussion, blah blah blah,’ because if we have full ranks, we can keep the meeting going, and, and then get things done — because if the opposition walks out, we can just make,
19:43 like, endless decisions in a short amount of time. So it’s this kind of committee maneuvering, this whole thing that was going on at STV — the Social Affairs and Health Committee — and I was an extra there, as a substitute member, keeping the governing party’s ranks full. And then, um, um, then, well, it was one of those days again where we’d been sitting for 17 hours, and, um, then I thought, well, this is a whole new sport for me, but if I were on a board — some company’s board — I would give a pretty strongly opinionated, honest, openly candid speech. Like, ‘this is total crap, that’ what does it matter, like, what does it matter whether we discuss this now or the opposition discusses this matter, because the governing-party members have already said, like, no, this isn’t going to fly. So we’re just burning
20:46 time, basically. And that was really on the same level as any board work, whether that’s a company’s board, or the Finnish Economists’ association’s board, or wherever. So there wasn’t, in my own opinion, anything all that strange about it, but, um, in politics, this kind of theater gets performed. So then certain, um, opposition-party representatives acted all outraged, and ‘never,’ and, and used this kind of superlative language, and, um, and so on, but it was really just totally normal, like, ‘hey, come on, let’s actually stop this rambling and get decisions on the table’ — I mean, we all know what this game is. It was that kind of thing. And then, um, after a while, I moved back to the substitute’s bench. The actual member came in to STV, and, um, then, then this one
21:47 politician there — um, when they were having some discussion about things, she again got, um, outraged, and she said, ‘I can’t’ accept this,’ and blah, blah, blah. And then I said — I remarked from the substitute’s bench, ‘well, but you’re in the opposition,’ like — and that was all I said, but, like, in parentheses, meaning, of course, if there are good points, we’ll take them on board — but since the governing parties have said these aren’t going to fly right now. Mm. So what does it matter what your opinion is, and what happens to you, or, like, what does or doesn’t suit you, because you’re in the opposition. And it was obvious that it was filibustering. In my opinion it should be obvious to everyone that the context was filibustering. Well, exactly that. And, I mean, the same goes the other way too — if I’m in the opposition next term, if I even get re-elected at all, and so on, then I too would understand this. So, that, um, that — it’s, like — I’d
22:48 suggest, ‘hey, could we think of it this way’ — and then the governing parties say no, fine. Then it’s pointless for me to keep dragging it out. But anyway, this particular person then got outraged — like, really went into orbit right there. A former minister, and, um, and I, I, I was, like, taken aback by it — like, ‘did you maybe misunderstand something, what did I’ — I just said that, since you’re in the opposition, that’s all — everyone gets that you’re in the opposition and this is filibustering — how can you be that upset about it? And then when there was a break, I didn’t notice that all the governing-party members had left the room. Mm. I was left in that room with only the opposition-party members. I hadn’t even thought to be wary of a situation like that. Mm. And then, there, I went up to the end of the table, where Krista Kiuru was sitting — this one person, and another, and, and,
23:50 um, and, and I’m standing on the other side of the committee table, which is 2 meters wide, and then there are chairs on top of that, so it’s really about three meters away. And I was coming over there, like, hey, um, ‘is everything okay, because now, now you probably misunderstood something, since you got so worked up like that.’ That’s what I was about to say, but I didn’t get a single word out before this person said, ‘I’m not talking to you.’ And then I was just, like, ‘what the [bleep] is going on?’ Like that. And then the other person picked it up and started narrating the situation, like, ‘you come over here acting in a threatening manner.’ And I was just, like, ‘seriously, what— what’s happening here?’ That’s when I, that’s when I started to realize that some kind of narrative was being written here. Yeah, that’s when the, like, warning lights came on. I thought, ‘some narrative is being written here that isn’t going to be [unclear] —’ friendly to some left-wing journalist’s column.
24:51 Anyway, so I said to the other person, who was claiming that I’d acted threateningly, I said, ‘hey, don’t, don’t blow this thing up, this situation.’ That’s not quite proper Finnish, but that’s just what I happened to say. I say that word exactly, and, um, and I left that situation and I said, I think, as I was starting to get a bit heated at that point, that ‘damn, what a clown.’ Those were all the things I said in that situation. And then, when the meeting continued, the one who’d been so shocked then went and shared that shock with the whole, whole committee. And, um, and at that point I then got to say something, like, ‘hey, seriously, I was actually about to come over and apologize, since you got so upset about the fact that I’d said that, well, since you’re in the opposition’ — that’s the sentence I said that got her so worked up. And, um, and at that point Krista Kiuru gave her own remarks, in her capacity as chair, saying, yeah,
25:55 of course she understands people can experience situations differently, and so on, ‘but I, sitting right here between the two of you, from where I was sitting, it certainly looked like Paasi was coming over to apologize to the whole committee — and this’ ‘is common knowledge.’ Okay, fast forward. So then, at some point, about a week — a week later — there was Independence Day right in between and something like that, and then, on Independence Day, so, um, so, Paula Risikko called me — um, the deputy speaker of parliament, the deputy speaker — and, um, said that right now the media’s cooking up some kind of soup. And, um, then, on Monday, the next day, well, then the media was, like, all over me, since we were doing this STV business again. And, um, there was this Helsingin Sanomat reporter, who’d
26:57 been trying to reach me, and I said, well, it took a little while before we ended up in the same place, and, and she then did the interview, and she asked me things like, roughly, ‘what’s your shoe size, are you this or that,’ and blah, blah, like, some completely pointless stuff. And, um, and then I went and sat back down in committee again, and then within, like, 5 to 10 minutes she had already published the piece, in which, um, it was claimed that I had threatened a female individual, and she hadn’t actually asked me about that at all when she interviewed me five minutes earlier — instead, she, she had already written the piece in full, clearly, because it came out just like snap — bang, and there were just some pointless comments of mine in it, like, blah-blah-blah, and, and that was the only thing in this whole mess that, um, back then, and
28:02 even now, um, it goes beyond my sense of justice, that — that it was really, yeah, really embarrassing on YLE, on that live TV, how it went, in my own opinion. For some reason my throat just completely seized up. I couldn’t get a word out. I don’t even know who was interviewing me. It was a really confusing situation. It was really embarrassing. Of course I was mortified. Um, and, um — could I have lived without that storm? Well, maybe. On the other hand, it was really instructive, so I, like— to be honest about it, I wouldn’t trade away a single day of it. But in there was this, this kind of fabricated claim — a smear campaign — which Helsingin Sanomat took part in, and which never got corrected at any point, even though I did everything I could to get it corrected. That article has been corrected eight times, but, um, not on that particular point.
29:07 So that was the story. And maybe, coming back to why this was, all the same, such a good experience — it’s that I um — I was a five-month-old politician at that point, four maybe, and I really learned a lot from that whole batch of events. First of all, that the National Coalition Party’s modus operandi is to throw you under the bus. In other words, they want — if someone supposedly messes up, then, um, they want to cut that MP loose from it, or rather cut themselves — the party — loose from that scandal. So that’s the first thing that gets done. So they put out — issue a statement saying, yeah, ‘this person behaved badly. We’ve had a serious talk. We’ve said that this is really, really stupid,’ and the party, which has nothing to do with this business —
30:08 and, um, Paasi regrets it, or this person regrets it and is truly remorseful, and it’s really stupid, and this will never happen again — but this has nothing to do with the National Coalition Party in any way. And this, even though we’d had a really good, good mutual conversation with the group leader at the time, then, all the same, like, my own group, the National Coalition MPs’ group, supported me like crazy through all sorts of channels — hugs in the hallways, encouragement, messages of support by email, this and that. Um, some people were on X defending me, coming out over this tabloid-headline stuff. So this kind of oddity, this kind of discrepancy — that the public party throws you under the bus, while your own people support you like crazy — but, like, preferably not visibly. The Finance Minister supported me publicly,
31:12 along with a few other Finns Party MPs. That support meant, of course, an absolute hell of a lot in that moment. But also other party members — I mean, MPs — cheered me on, the ones who’d actually been through the same situation themselves. I mean, that’s really a situation every journalist ought to get to experience. because it’s, it’s quite the pressure cooker when it just won’t let up, and, and, um, and, and, um, you’re ashamed of the publicity that comes out of it, and words get put in your mouth that were never there. They distort things without a care, and it’s quite the defamation package, especially in this case, on that front, since this is a very stigmatizing thing — um, namely that I
32:16 ‘threatened some female individual’ in the line of work, or in general — well, that’s just complete bullshit. That’s how it is, in my opinion. It’s, um, like a textbook cancellation attack, and they try to slap on that kind of permanent label. And that’s why I myself immediately hit back, like, on X, with a supportive statement, because it was just so blatantly obvious that it was this kind of, um, orchestrated attempt to slap a certain brand of stigma onto you. And I have to keep going — that then, then this is how the media operates — remember now, this isn’t opinion, this is first-hand knowledge. And the media then operates in such a way that, first of all, the reason Helsingin Sanomat ran that kind of story was, of course, that if the story had been that National Coalition’s Paasi pounded his fist on the table and, like, gave the opposition a talking-to, then every one of my voters would’ve been thrilled, totally, like, absolutely, ‘wow, that’s our guy,’ like, really great.
33:18 So they had to get some kind of stigmatizing, negative crap into it, so that the story wouldn’t turn out that way. That’s why this setup got put in there. Yeah. But that was, in my opinion, pretty transparent. And then, like, what the media then does is — Hufvudstadsbladet then picked that story up from there and ran a whole piece based on just that. Mm. And that’s how it then got chained around, through this whole media landscape, and, and, and, um, they managed to produce this kind of tabloid-level thing, which then shows up everywhere. That’s just how it is, in that sense. It’s probably good, by the way, that you also now have your own media outlet, so you can go through these things there on Paasipodi. I mean, for me too, people have very rarely tried to cancel me. One time it was close, and I just took that whole issue and brought the person on as a guest the next week, and it just fizzled out from there. So in that sense I find it — and that was a good idea of yours, taking over that parliament podcast studio,
34:21 so, at that point, maybe a tip for others too, that, that it works. But if we go now with roughly the assumption that, since the government program had already, like, been sealed by the time you basically stepped into the parliament chamber, then I’ll give you the right to still be a bit of an outsider and critical of this government program. So let’s start think about the sequencing of it. So, so, in my opinion, this is, of course — the right-wing government has, for the most part, done good things, but in my opinion this has been sequenced completely wrong. So, for example, now that during 2026 the big tax cuts are coming, why weren’t they done right at the start, so that we’d already have their effect baked in and we’d have gotten economic growth right away? That’s, in my opinion, maybe the biggest mistake, that they waited this long, and that at the start this kind of easy, easy lever for impact was left unused. That’s a good question. I don’t know why not, but, but maybe here it’s, like, good to quickly recap a certain
35:21 political reality that I’ve, that I’ve come to realize. Mm. And it was this — that, um, before a government is even formed, every party writes up a kind of wish list of what, what they’ll bring into the government program, if one day we get there. Mm. Then, once that moment comes, of okay, ‘now we’re putting together a government,’ then an individual politician’s wish lists have already been melted into the party’s wish list, where they’ve already been watered down and turned into compromises once already. And then the parties negotiate among themselves, which waters it down even further — combining the different positions into some kind of best-possible mix, from the point of view of all the parties. That’s really the whole point. And out of that comes this great, mighty government-program document, in which everything’s written down — it’s the book. It’s like the Bible. Everything’s written into it,
36:23 all the goals, pretty much — well, how do I put it — not exactly at a general level, but they’re put in there nonetheless. And once that’s been settled, then, then the government sets out to implement that program, and the minister posts get handed out — different people become ministers — and then the items from that government program that belong to a particular ministry, or a minister’s role, or duties — those then get broken down into work at that ministry, and then they write — they write up some draft, and consult, or request statements on that draft. Then they fold those statement responses into, into that government bill, which then goes to committees — to the relevant committee, say the Transport and Communications Ministry’s bills go to the Transport and
37:27 Communications Committee, and there they hear from, say, 60, 70, 80 experts, and a response is drafted, and then the bill goes back to the ministry, and then the ministry takes whatever it takes from those comments, writes it into the government bill, and then, then it goes to its first vote. And that’s, like, the fastest round this whole thing can possibly go through — but that’s the process, and it takes time. Um, but anyway, so, um, this is what then gets ground through the mill. You’ve got the government program, the Bible, and then you just start grinding through these laws one by one. And at the start, nothing happens, because everything’s still stuck in the ministries, and then they start coming to the committees. There the amount of work starts to grow, and, and then in the plenary chamber they start voting these things through at an accelerating pace. And really, the only thing being done here is
38:27 implementing the government program — trying to race through it as fast as possible, because on any given day the government could fall, and then the whole thing collapses and that’s it. It’s game over, and at that point the government program becomes toilet paper, and the whole thing has to reset to zero, and, well, in principle, the things that are already in the pipeline might still get through, but, but as a rule, no. And that’s basically the setup, and that’s why I’ve come to state that, that, well, that politics — um, meaning democracy, I mean, means that if you have, if you’ve got the Finns Party, National Coalition, Christian Democrats, and the Swedish People’s Party all agreeing, for example, on the same thing — like, ‘damn it, let’s cut business subsidies in half. Now, goddammit, now we show who’s boss. Now we’re going to make a
39:27 clean break from these do-nothing previous governments.’ Everyone’s unanimous. Okay, fine, let’s do it that way. I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened, but, just as an example. But then once you start looking at things line by line, then one item works for one party, but not for another. One cut doesn’t suit the Swedish People’s Party, another doesn’t suit the Christian Democrats, a third doesn’t suit the National Coalition, a fourth doesn’t suit the Finns Party. And then that 50% cut target shrinks, in practice, down to some kind of, like, size, some laughably small amount. And that’s how it is with everything — that’s what democracy is, and it means that even if a governing party — or, I mean, the Prime Minister’s party — has clear goals, wants certain things, it’s still not an absolute ruler. This, this is — this is, well, this — this hits
40:29 this, this fact, this reality — it hits pretty much everyone out there, except, like, the experienced politicians, because they never had that kind of assumption to begin with. But sometimes it feels like the professional politicians don’t even understand that — like, even National Coalition voters, in a way, assumed that if we now say we’re going to stop living on debt, that actually means that during this government term we’ll cut enough that it actually stops. So, so, like, and hopefully we can still get it to stop, but but, um, and, and so on. But I think we’re about to run short on time here, and, and on this — but I still have to get in one more thing here, like a kind of in defense of that, still — when this sitting Orpo government was being put together, first they reportedly sat for four, five weeks listening to experts, so that everyone got the same
41:30 picture of the situation. And then it was decided they’d take the kind of measures these experts wanted. Do everything, make enough adjustments. If the adjustments aren’t enough, then adjust more, and set up a growth working group, and, damn it, throw in everything. And then, once that growth working group was set up, something came out of it. And they’d also, as requested, asked for measures, um, from lobbying organizations and citizens and everyone possible. All 601 growth-oriented measures are being put into production. 601 of them. And it takes two — two hours, 45 minutes to read every single one through. Paasipodi, episode 25, if I recall — I read through those 601 growth decisions. It took 2 hours, 45 minutes. I mean, an insane number of decisions.
42:36 And as for these cuts, the whole time — since the goalposts have kept moving away, economic growth hasn’t come, and they’ve kept tightening the screws, cutting, adjusting more — and now, when it comes to the 10 billion, has enough been done? If you ask me, no — they should have done twice as much. But, but, in that light, if I had been that same prime minister way back when — well, I’m a bit the type who always takes a bit — I think I know how to put myself in proportion to the experts’ comments, and I know that experts typically pull a bit toward the conservative side — if things are bad, they’ll say it’s not quite as bad as it really is; if things are good, they’ll say it’s not quite as good as it really is. Um, so I’d have liked to aim for — if I’d been the one deciding, I would’ve aimed for a bit more in cuts, to get a margin, a safety margin. Now
43:39 this thing will surely get pulled right up to the wire, right to the finish line, and we’ll get whichever way it shakes out. Yeah. But maybe my question, still, is, um, about that tax timing thing. You’ve also had as a guest Elias Erämaja — our chief economist, so to speak — and, um, on that right at the start of the government program we had this kind of discussion about the fact that here in Finland, we had, back then, and even still — a couple of days before this recording — the world’s second- or third-highest top marginal tax rate. And there was just this incomprehensible kind of debate over whether we could even remove that solidarity surtax — two percentage points — and, like, we couldn’t. And that felt completely incomprehensible, that we couldn’t even start there — whereas now, again, in 2026 we’re bringing that top marginal tax rate down from 59 — a completely insane level — down to something like 52, which is [still] an insane level. Not a completely insane level, but still anything over 50 is just crazy. So, so this is something that should
44:39 have been done right away, because it would obviously have been the most effective measure. And in a way I just, like, don’t understand why it wasn’t front-loaded right at the start, this — the single most effective thing. I can’t say why, but I do know this: that whenever you cut taxes, the money has to be found from somewhere — except that, in a way, there’s a small delay before it comes back through that dynamic effect, because if you’re really — I mean, taxes are always disincentive taxes, so you get less of whatever you tax more. And if you’re taxing at the world’s third-highest level on something, then you’re probably going to get the world’s third-lowest amount of that thing — that is, earned income. And, like, that’s really how it obviously plays out. I just don’t get how stupid that debate was — and maybe, in the government’s defense, on A-Studio, Sixten Korkman and, um, Patrizio Lainà, everyone was going on about how it could possibly be that Finland — one of the world’s six highest-tax-rate countries — could even consider lowering that tax rate here at all — the whole debate was just totally insane, about how we
45:41 could possibly replace the disappearing tax revenue, because otherwise it’s the end of the world. We’ve somewhat gotten past that now, and maybe now, in its defense, now that, in a way, this year, ‘25, has been really bad, then next year, once those effects fully kick in on income tax, and the 13.5% VAT cut also kicks in partially, then, then I’m actually pretty optimistic about 2026 — that we’ll have growing domestic demand, tax revenue will come from that, and we still have that shockingly huge backpack — 84,000 euros per citizen in public consumption spending. That backpack definitely needs to be lightened. But on the private side, we’ve got quite a lot of investable purchasing power now, and the stock market’s also risen, in ‘25, by something like 35% here. Okay. But foreigners own almost all of that. It doesn’t, it doesn’t rain down here domestically, because we’ve also had ownership destroyed, among other things, by that kind of wimpy decision not to bring in a Swedish-style inheritance-into-capital-gains tax setup instead. So from that,
46:45 big minus for us. But, um, now it feels like — well, I mean — let’s actually put up this classic chart here — I posted it for fun on LinkedIn, because one other acquaintance was just criticizing this — the wealth trend since 2024: Finland’s risen from something like 75 grand up to 150,000 euros; Sweden, from around 80,000 euros, has risen to 300,000 per adult, after that inheritance-tax-into-capital-gains-tax reform. So really, that much more wealth has genuinely flowed into Sweden — doubled, compared to us — such that on that wealth, the capital-gains tax collected from sales made on it would be, like, would be many times more than that measly 1.2 billion of ours that comes in here in Finland. We’re not — that’s not where that money would come from. We’re not exactly of one mind on this matter, of course not. Well, yeah, but I mean these two — these are two big minuses for the right-wing government. Taxes two years too late, or
47:45 a year and a half too late. And then, um, that inheritance-tax opportunity got postponed, like, possibly until after a ‘blue-red’ coalition era — National Coalition plus the Social Democrats — so, six years down the line. And even the marginal-tax cut has gotten a mile-long outcry over it. Yeah, yeah. But that’s the same kind of ‘Krista Kiuru leaning’-style noise that just comes out of that crazy press, and it’s, it’s exactly the same thing — that these dynamic effects are just obvious, and, and there shouldn’t really be two ways about it. But, but, well, I’ve been thinking now, of course — especially, this right-wing government would certainly gladly cut earned-income tax to, say, a flat 25 percent — well, that’s actually what foreign workers get, expats get, that is, yes, all the experts who come to Finland, and expats — meaning returning Finns too — get 25% withholding tax for the next seven years. But, but anyway, the point here again is that, of course,
48:46 this sitting government would of course have cut taxes across the board — all sorts of pointless taxes, VAT, whatever systems, straight to the ground — if it didn’t have to worry about the fact that the deficit — it can’t, it has to shrink at the same time, and it certainly shouldn’t be growing. And yet, still, these decisions from the previous government keep feeding, um, this kind of mess and chaos and bad, growing problems during this government term. So, for example, a simple thing like this: interest expenses were 0.8 billion under the Marin government, and now they’re 3.2 billion today. That’s the same amount the Finnish taxpayer lost in the Uniper deal. 3.2 billion — and in four years’ time it’ll be five. I mean, just think — and I have to mention, in a Rahapodi episode with Alexander Herlin, we went through how removing the interest-rate hedge — the derivative —
49:49 and replacing the collateral position brought costs from the debt. So, so, um, somewhere, some numbskull decided, during the Marin government, over at the State Treasury, to drop this — or, or rather, to keep going with this floating-rate funding, when it could have — so, concretely, what this was about was that there was, quite concretely — the state had issued a bond that generated 50 million euros a year for Finland. That was a guaranteed income, because — since it’s discounted and so on — you know, that’s the whole deal: 50 million gets paid to Finland for having taken out that loan. Finland doesn’t pay — Finland gets 50 million. I mean, it’s the same as if you went and took out a million-euro mortgage for yourself, and you got paid 50 grand a year for having taken out that loan. That’s the situation it was. And then there’d been some strategy for the last 15, 17 years that had actually served
50:50 well, right up to the point when rates came down — it had served well. So, you convert that fixed rate — variable rate — into a short-term rate via a swap, through a swap arrangement. And somehow the light hadn’t gone on at that point, when rates were negative, like, ‘wait a second, maybe we should rethink this interest-rate strategy of ours.’ And that’s why they went with the old playbook and swapped that — and, as luck would have it, it turned out so unfortunately that rates just went and rocketed straight through the roof just a few months later, basically. It was just this unbelievable cluster[bleep]. So, and, well, in that, they took the long end and converted it to short, right when this yield curve was about to rise — so that’s — actually, I’ve got a one-month Euribor rate on my own mortgage, and I’ve actually been happy with it, even during these rising periods, because over time it’s been lower. But then, um, there’s a further twist here: when you swap into it, since that curve has started rising up from negative territory,
51:50 you then have to put up, um, put up collateral for that derivative that’s sitting at a loss, and you have to finance that too. So now these sins of the past, like — and these State Treasury people still go around somewhere, like, giving talks or remarks, where they say that historically this has generated 8 billion, but then, on top of that, they don’t count this, like, realized loss, nor the derivative’s collateral-position funding cost. So, whenever you interview the State Treasury, ask them straight up whether these have now been factored into that financing cost — please don’t just talk about those past interest savings, but about the whole mess of a position. And now we’ve got, tucked away, a growing national debt whose interest costs are rising, and where, in a way, risk management could fail, and then, on top of that, our credit rating — the whole financing security — rests on 98% foreign bondholders. So this State Treasury hasn’t even done the least little bit of thinking about how we could get at least some of this
52:53 national debt financed domestically. Unlike pretty much every other country in the world — like, say, Italy and others that are among the crisis countries — they’ve been trying forever to direct their debt-servicing at home too. Some restless host of the Rahapodi podcast, um, he went, back then, in the era of negative interest rates, shouting all the way on YLE, that we should take out 100 billion in loans. Negative interest rate — so really invest it in something productive, that is — and that’s how I think about it: let’s make Finland an superpower of entrepreneurship, let’s make everything possible. Or, then again, under the Marin government it would have just raised the discretionary 20 billion of spending to 80 billion. And, um, of course with the wrong decisions you get the wrong outcome. And it would’ve just been called a ‘future investment,’ when it’s really an income transfer to left-wing friends, basically. Do stupid things, win stupid prizes.
53:53 But, um, yeah, yeah. But there’s the actual analysis — that locking in a fixed rate with a big principal did exactly this. Right. Yeah. And, and they basically took out a hundred-year fixed-rate loan, which they then paid back in two years. Mm. If I recall, 40 percent — 40 cents on the euro. Yeah, they took that euro and then paid off the whole thing — that’s basically how it is, because, I mean, this exact State Treasury situation — we’ve got this, um, this loss-making swap position that has to be capitalized, whereas the state could otherwise just buy that loan back from the market at a lower price, so somehow, I mean, we really do have some terrible financial journalists, honestly. But, but now maybe let’s get back to this, your National Coalition, um, government-position thing. Okay, you’re a backbench MP, but now the home stretch is starting. So we’ve hopefully got this stock-market-discounted recovery year coming, where these tax cuts, and, um, partial
54:56 interest savings start lifting the national economy’s incentives to recover. Construction has been hammered down flat to the ground, so it feels like there ought to be room to bounce back. Hopefully. Domestic demand has been somewhat scared down too, so in principle you could actually well afford — like, before this, at lunch, we actually treated ourselves to a proper diet Pepsi here — a bit of that everyday-luxury kind of consumption. But, um, it still kind of bugs me that there hasn’t been any heavier lifting done — that on the spending side, 159 billion in public consumption spending — well, it’s easy for me, it’s easy for me to say, yeah, if it had been up to me — right? But you remember now, what I think, or even if I had been — had been prime minister — that wouldn’t mean it would actually happen, because all the governing parties would have to be unanimous on that matter. But if you were to ask me now, with the benefit of hindsight,
55:59 I’d say they should have originally cut — front-loaded those cuts, as was the plan, but more aggressively front-loaded — with the idea that these cuts would not only remove the growing debt accumulation, but would also make it possible to finance those tax cuts. In other words, cut enough that we’re able to cut — to lower taxes. So, through cuts, we first remove and cut enough that the debt accumulation stops, and then, on top of that, even more, so we can get taxes lowered. And now, we have lowered taxes, but unfortunately we’re still having to cut more, because all sorts of surprises keep coming from the right and the left. But I do have to say that, yes, the Orpo government — honestly, every single thing that’s been done has been the right decision.
57:01 Maybe the timing should have been different. Maybe they should have been a bit bigger, but, I mean, all of these — and I think it’s kind of crappy that, that in the view of economics nerds, the IMF, and everyone else, they’ve all agreed — ‘hey, great, you’re cleaning up this mess’ — and then economic growth just doesn’t show up, and the goalposts move again, and then you do more, and more, and more. But what that leads to is that, in the political arena, it looks, in the eyes of voters, like, ‘ah, the targets aren’t being met’ — they just aren’t being reached. In other words, living on debt just can’t be stopped, and, um, story after story keeps coming out that’s negative for the average Finn. It’s a bit like — if you’re doing, if you have to reduce headcount at some company, you let go of enough people all at once, so that you don’t create
58:04 that kind of, like, drip-feed layoff spiral, that kills the whole team’s motivation. So it’s extremely important that, you take the whole batch [unclear] and clear the table properly in one go, so that it’s definitely enough — and then, with the remaining crew, you sincerely set out to save the company, come rain or shine, and, with kind of that same mentality, they should have cut enough, quite a bit too much, honestly, so that they wouldn’t need to come back to these cuts ever again during this particular government term, and, and, all at once, like that. And what puzzles me, as a layman — and this is because again, I don’t understand — I’m not a professional politician. Maybe someone like that could give a sensible answer to this, but it’s that, when
59:05 we had that Murto growth working group, why didn’t we have some other person’s — say, an organizational-cleanup — cuts working group, a super-expert cuts working group on trimming down organizations. So we have 4,200 organizations in Finland that get money from the state. They don’t raise a single cent themselves, and, and there are — vacations, I mean, organizations that exist purely to organize vacations, and, and there are political — um — organizations. There are also organizations that do genuinely important work, like Aseman Lapset [a children’s charity] for example, or something similar. But there are also, like, 15 of them doing, in principle, basically the same things, so, so this whole organizations thing, and then business subsidies — these are exactly the kind of things that absolutely should have — I mean, they should have gone through the whole budget, in its entirety, line by line, and dug into every single line,
60:09 asking, ‘wait a second, could this be merged with something else? Can we shrink that group that way? Is this totally pointless?’ And if you’ll allow me, um, here I do sincerely hope — of course nobody’s hoping for anything else — that we get economic growth going now, and this thing takes off like a shot from a cannon, and so on. But we’d also need — what, what has puzzled me the whole time, and was actually the reason I went into politics, I can say quite sincerely, is this lack of crisis awareness. We’ve got health-and-social-services spending, interest costs, and defense spending inevitably rising. Interest expenses, because — well, I won’t say who’s to blame. Health-and-social-services spending, because Finns are aging. Even though of course we can make things more efficient by changing how we operate, it’s still growing regardless. You can’t really, as a baseline, cut it
61:10 all that dramatically, given the assumptions we have about how well we take care of people in Finland. Then there’s defense spending — that’s obviously rising too, of course, because we have a neighbor that’s once again thrown itself onto a war footing. That’s 36 billion out of the state’s 90 billion euro budget. That means that if we needed to cut — they should have originally, should have cut that 20 billion — that 20 billion would have needed to be aimed at whatever’s left over once health-and-social-services, interest, and defense spending are left untouched. That 20 billion out of the remaining 53 billion — that hurts. That hurts like hell. I mean, that’s the massive figure with which we wouldn’t have adjusted by just ten — we’d have cut that 20.
62:12 That’s what it would have taken to actually get the, um, debt accumulation stopped, and at that point there wouldn’t even have been a single tax cut in the bag yet. But just think, if I’d been Petteri Orpo, and I’d gone into the Council of State and proposed something like this to, say, Anders Adlercreutz, or Essayah, or — well, Riikka might actually have been fairly on board with it, but, but still, still, I mean, it’s really just, like, that’s just pure political suicide. They wouldn’t just say no — they’d say, ‘have you taken the wrong medication for breakfast?’ No, no, there’s just no way it would have happened. But that’s what should have been done. Why? Well, because if the opposite happens from what we’re all hoping for — that we get peace in Ukraine — then these hardliners — professional military men with a general’s rank — they say it’ll be about two years
63:16 before, um, Putin tests NATO’s Article Five — meaning, if one NATO country gets attacked, then, in effect, you’re attacking against all the countries, and everyone comes to help. And on this, Helena Petäjistö just wrote her latest column on MTV3 about this exact topic, which is also based on these same hardliners’ assessments, and so on. It describes exactly that — some small place gets taken, say, Narva, which is right there on the border, and then people discuss, well, maybe if it stays just at that, then it’s not such a big deal. And France wouldn’t really be interested in going off and raising hell. Like, are we really going to risk a third world war, and Trump might not either. Like, hell, we’re not about to, over some backwater village or anything, go start a third world war. And, and, um, and then the next attack comes at some other point, some other small backwater village, and smaller, smaller, smaller — and the goalposts just keep getting moved a little
64:17 further forward, and that’s how this plays out. So we’re living in this kind of reality right now, unfortunately, and here in Finland we’re bickering over whether state culture subsidies — culture subsidies, whatever they’re called, subsidies going to culture — whether they can be cut by 3%. Mm. For third-sector organizations, where there’s, like, overlap — just 3%. Mm. And what happens? Out of that comes, of course, an almighty uproar, because there are, um, like-minded journalists — Helsingin Sanomat and Yleisradio full of them — and it gets scrapped. Mm. And this is, like — this is really, like, the perfect picture of political cowardice [unclear]. Mm. So, so, I mean, in no way does
65:19 that mean anything. Just think, if I were to cut — say you were a salaried employee, and I said, ‘hey, listen, sorry, but I’m cutting your salary by 5%, because times are tough right now — can you live with it?’ Well, would you, like, would you throw — would you throw yourself on the floor and throw some kind of screaming tantrum over it? Well, no, of course not — I’d go code some AI productivity tool, and through that boost in productivity, my salary could get restored back to the same level. Right, exactly, that works too. Yeah. But this is the level we’re operating at right now. So, shouldn’t we still wrap this up on a positive note of expectation, that if the stock market has now risen that 35 percent, that’s some kind of forecasting instrument. Um, well, the stock market also rose over 100% in Argentina, which managed to stabilize its economy and generate GDP growth — so, in my opinion, let’s take that most recent figure of 7.7%. So that comes to mind [unclear], so, so let’s take this now as a kind of positive omen, and believe that we’ve got
66:23 some good growth years coming, and the dynamic effects kick in a bit ahead of schedule, and the state’s finances also start stabilizing a little. So I wish everyone a good 2026 — all our listeners, viewers — and thank you for coming on, Martin Paasi. I suggest we have one more short conversation, just among ourselves, about the guests you’ve managed to line up on Paasipodi. Of course, besides me — I’ve apparently been, by far, the most-featured guest in the entire history of humankind — you’re the only guest who’s come on three times, basically. So it’s definitely worth going to listen to those [unclear]. I mean, I haven’t even held back — I’ve ranted even more there than I do here, so I’d say these guest appearances are fun in that sense, because, because you get to be even a bit more colorful than here on my own home turf. Thanks for this, and see you on the inner-circle side — bye bye.