The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180

Summary

Episode 180 is a campaign-period conversation with two parliamentary candidates from Uusimaa — Tere Sammallahti (National Coalition, number 78) and Onni Rostila (Finns Party, number 341) — recorded in the studio and format of Ivan Puopolo’s satire show a month before Finland’s 2023 election. The framing joke is that an “election quarantine” would have required a left-winger in the studio, and today there are only “positive right-wing atoms”. Every position below belongs to the guests and the host; this page reports them as stated rather than endorsing them.

Estonia is the comparison that structures the first half. Its election result, and its 21 per cent flat tax at a moment when Estonians are debating whether even that is too high. Sammallahti says he receives messages from Finnish entrepreneurs who have moved their businesses there and do not feel able to return, and argues Eastern Europe simply does not hold the Finnish debate about raising the total tax rate further to become “a real welfare state”. Rostila’s contribution is the sharpest analytical point in the episode: under a flat tax too, someone earning ten times as much pays ten times as much tax — against a Finnish progression that Miettinen calculates at roughly thirty times — so in his reading work has been assigned the logic of a corrective tax.

On the public sector, Sammallahti argues Estonia benefited from never building a massive permanent state apparatus, and offers the episode’s most memorable image, which he flags himself as crude: a public sector is like body fat percentage. Some is fine; past morbid obesity your capacity and health fail, and by then losing it is far harder than not gaining it.

On the fiscal debate, both return to the 2007 “Sari the Nurse” auction over who promised larger spending increases, and to what Sammallahti finds most striking — that the deficit then became chronic at 11 to 12 billion, which in his view Covid and the war do not explain. Miettinen’s media criticism is that if the debate is always framed as how many billions are distributed, the sign never flips to how many are taken away. On the adjustment list that the finance ministry’s budget chief Mika Niemelä took public over the ministers’ heads — a “boss move” in Miettinen’s words — the guests read the message as Finns having been misled, right up to the level of their decision-makers, into believing their standard of living is higher than it is. Sammallahti defends the list as proper civil service work and says that as prime minister he would ask for a longer one, draw a line under eight or ten billion, and not leave the room until the number was met. As an aside Miettinen concedes losing his own argument about Sweden’s Covid policy: friends sent him an excess mortality table in which Tegnell’s Sweden was lowest.

The second half turns to an equality ombudsman’s opinion on a school assignment in Salo which had stated there are two sexes and which school staff reported. Rostila’s response is the weightiest passage in the episode and is made explicitly as a lawyer: the interpretation of the Equality Act has drifted from what the preparatory works and the legislator intended, and — more seriously in his view — the opinion contains no weighing against freedom of expression as protected by the constitution. Sammallahti’s proposal is administrative, folding the non-discrimination ombudsman’s office into the equality ombudsman’s with reduced resources. The guests’ wider claims about activism inside institutions are their own and are not verified here.

On the double-standard angle, Rostila draws the episode’s most balanced distinction between two ministers: Sanna Marin’s cases happened largely on her own time while Mika Lintilä is suspected in connection with official duties — but cutting the other way, Marin’s cases were publicly evidenced while Lintilä is accused on anonymous rumour, and no evidence has been offered that his duties were impaired. Speculation about who leaked what inside the Centre Party is the guests’ own and is not repeated here.

The closing stretch is the most transferable part, and it is about trust rather than politics. Both candidates had roadside signs torn down in the campaign’s first days. Sammallahti describes the mechanism that makes sabotage tempting — the closer election day comes, the more uncertain every candidate becomes, and bad ideas start to look good — and states his own line plainly: his team has been told no sabotage happens under any circumstances, and it has put back up countless signs belonging to competing parties’ candidates. Around that he builds the general point that once people start wondering whether they can say what they actually think, soon nothing gets said, and all political cooperation gets harder. Rostila’s closing line is that because politics after an election is negotiation, negotiating skill is the cornerstone of doing politics.

A note on the source

The MacWhisper transcript carries no speaker labels. With two guests, named attributions rest on direct evidence in the transcript — being addressed by name, a candidate number, a profession (lawyer) or an office (the National Coalition council group in Espoo); passages whose speaker could not be established are described without a name. There are no gaps in the transcription. This is a campaign-period conversation in which two candidates set out political views, reported here as stated rather than as fact.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Varjoviisasteluklubi oikeistokaappaus | Tere Sammallahti Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.