Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk | Heikki Pursiainen, Kai Lintunen | Neuvottelija 178

A note on reading this

This is an election episode recorded a month before Finland’s April 2023 parliamentary vote, in which two candidates from the same party speak in their own names. The views are theirs and are attributed by speaker below. Forecasts are marked as forecasts, and where the guests disagree with each other or with the interviewer, the disagreement is left standing.

Summary

Heikki Pursiainen, an economist standing for the National Coalition Party in Helsinki, and Kai Lintunen, a lawyer-economist standing in Uusimaa, came on a month before the 2023 election.

Constitutional review is the heart of it. Finland has no constitutional court; members of parliament assess constitutionality themselves in the Constitutional Law Committee. Lintunen, who studied constitutional law, calls the practice perfect political theatre: the politicians promise they are not wearing the politician’s hat in the committee room, and politick the moment they step out. Pursiainen’s objection is more precise and is the best observation in the episode — the committee’s work is abstract and prospective, and the conditional is the verb form used in there. What is missing is concrete review after the fact, through which an individual could claim that a law or an administrative act infringes a specific right and have a court weigh competing rights against one another. Lintunen fairly notes that the constitution is applicable law and can be invoked; Pursiainen does not dispute it but says it happens very rarely because Finland lacks the history of doing so. On the American comparison Pursiainen inverts the usual complaint: the problem there is not the court but that legislation does not work, which is why abortion ended up with the judges.

Universal applicability splits the two candidates. Miettinen calls the universal applicability of collective agreements a tyranny of the minority that violates freedom of contract. Lintunen will not go along: it is not so simple that the rule is unlawful and must be destroyed wholesale; society is developed by law and by reason. Pursiainen takes a third position, separating whether it is constitutional — he suspects it probably is, since the Finnish constitution is not a doctrinally pure liberal document — from whether it is consistent with liberal theory, where his answer is no, because it is privatised legislation arriving through organisational power rather than through parliament. He then agrees with Lintunen on the remedy: the forest industry’s withdrawal shows the system being broken outside legislation rather than developed through it, and that is not in society’s interest.

State ownership. Lintunen defends strategic holdings on grounds of geography — a small country at these latitudes needs ammunition plants and electricity infrastructure. Pursiainen answers that in a crisis it makes no difference who owns the infrastructure, since it will be taken into national control; Fortum’s state ownership is a relic of a time when Finland had no capital. He distinguishes full ownership of a company doing official work, accepting Lintunen’s example of Erillisverkot, from a large undiversified stake in a listed company, which he calls bad for the company and bad for politics. Then he argues against himself: the one reason for caution about selling is that politicians would squander the proceeds, so his proposal is a transition from strategic owner to diversified portfolio owner. Miettinen adds Norway, whose holdings are deliberately in foreign companies, and notes that Patria’s partial sale to a Norwegian buyer in a NATO country left the Nammo joint venture intact.

The one open disagreement. Miettinen argues that if Mussolini is on the right, then Hitler’s national socialism belongs on the left, because companies were nationalised and directed into arms production. Pursiainen rejects it flatly as wrong in terms of intellectual history and as something “all the right-wing boys on Twitter repeat”. The episode does not resolve it. Underneath sits his real claim, which is the most analytical moment here: the left-right axis does not run along the market or liberty dimension, and the right contains at least right-liberals, conservatives who think in collectives, and an authoritarian right that is wholly collectivist. From which follows his own side’s self-criticism — the right deceives itself in believing it is automatically on the side of individual liberty.

Espoo and Helsinki. Lintunen argues Espoo’s case with numbers: 8,000 new residents against Helsinki’s 4,000, dynamism having moved out of a city that has grown shut. Pursiainen jabs that Espoo is not a real city, then declines the fight — easy as it is for him to whip himself into a rage about many things, he cannot summon the fire for this one. His substantive view is that the cities complement each other and only transport and zoning are genuinely difficult.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Arvot hukassa oikeusvaltio vaarassa | Heikki Pursiainen Kai Lintunen | Neuvottelija 178. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.