---
title: "Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk | Heikki Pursiainen, Kai Lintunen | Neuvottelija 178"
titleOriginal: "Arvot hukassa oikeusvaltio vaarassa | Heikki Pursiainen Kai Lintunen | Neuvottelija 178"
episodeNumber: "178"
guest: "Heikki Pursiainen, Kai Lintunen"
datePublished: 2023-03-02
duration: "47:43"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["finnish_economy_policy","free_speech_society","leadership_governance"]
subtitleMethod: "none"
provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata, the neuvottelija.fi episode record and a MacWhisper transcription of the Finnish audio. The chapter marks are the publisher's own list as released with the video, with two corrections made against the transcript: the publisher's 'Ulkoinen turvallisuus' entry carried no timestamp and has been placed at 43:23 where the topic actually begins, and the final three marks ran about a minute early and were re-derived from the transcript cues. No English caption track was produced, so no transcript is published here."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/265-arvot-hukassa-oikeusvaltio-vaarassa-heikki-pursiainen-kai-li"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep178-arvot-hukassa-oikeusvaltio-vaarassa-pursiainen-lintunen/
---
# Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk | Heikki Pursiainen, Kai Lintunen | Neuvottelija 178

English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript.

## Chapters

- [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=0s) Intro: politics has lost its values
- [00:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=31s) Introductions: Pursiainen, Coalition Helsinki no. 145; Lintunen, Coalition Uusimaa no. 67
- [01:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=100s) Everyone is attacking — does the Coalition have to blunder to lose?
- [02:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=160s) A bloc election
- [04:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=240s) Espoo versus Helsinki, and the Kauniainen doughnut effect
- [08:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=510s) County elections; Espoo is Finland's most Coalition-voting city
- [10:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=640s) Pursiainen's book Paska Suomi — is Finland less broken than it was?
- [16:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=980s) Public services versus leaving money in citizens' pockets
- [17:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1047s) Left-right, national conservative, green liberal — where do you sit?
- [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1145s) A four-quadrant model: transfers on one axis, values on the other
- [21:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1262s) Demonising the other side through illiberalism and totalitarianism
- [23:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1390s) National socialism versus fascism
- [24:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1476s) Should the state own companies? Uniper, security of supply, infrastructure
- [28:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1690s) Why Norway and Finnish pension funds invest abroad
- [30:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1836s) Which committees would suit your training?
- [32:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=1953s) Constitutional review: the committee, a constitutional court, and universal applicability
- [43:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=2603s) External security: Ukraine, Russia and the road to NATO
- [45:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=2735s) Why vote for Kai Lintunen
- [46:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=2762s) Why vote for Heikki Pursiainen
- [47:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0&t=2840s) Outro

## 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJbXg0_VqG0).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at
[www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/265-arvot-hukassa-oikeusvaltio-vaarassa-heikki-pursiainen-kai-li).

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Values Adrift, the Rule of Law at Risk | Heikki Pursiainen, Kai Lintunen | Neuvottelija 178, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep178-arvot-hukassa-oikeusvaltio-vaarassa-pursiainen-lintunen/, 2023-03-02. For quotes include episode 178 and timestamp.