---
title: "The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180"
titleOriginal: "Varjoviisasteluklubi oikeistokaappaus | Tere Sammallahti Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180"
episodeNumber: "180"
guest: "Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila"
datePublished: 2023-03-09
duration: "50:03"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["finnish_economy_policy","free_speech_society"]
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, each verified to fall within ten seconds of a real transcript cue, and translated into English here. No English caption track was produced, so no transcript is published here. The transcription contains no gaps. It carries no speaker labels, so with two guests the named attributions rest on direct evidence in the transcript — being addressed by name, a candidate number, a profession or an office — and passages whose speaker could not be established are described without a name. This is a campaign-period conversation in which two candidates set out political views; the summary reports them as stated rather than as statements of fact, and speculation about named individuals' motives is either marked as speculation or not repeated."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/267-varjoviisasteluklubi-oikeistokaappaus-tere-sammallahti-onni"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep180-varjoviisasteluklubi-oikeistokaappaus-sammallahti-rostila/
---
# The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180

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=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=0s) Ivan Puopolo's Viisasteluklubi hijacked from the right
- [00:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=45s) Onni Rostila 341, Finns Party, Uusimaa; Tere Sammallahti 78, National Coalition, Uusimaa. Iron Maiden in the karaoke corner
- [03:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=180s) The red-green bubble voted out in Estonia. A 21% income tax rate against 58% in Finland
- [11:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=690s) Finns want a right-wing government
- [15:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=920s) Was Sweden's Tegnell right after all?
- [16:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=1010s) The finance ministry's boss move — the adjustment list rebellion
- [19:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=1160s) Antti Rinne's type 2 diabetes miracle, and the collapse in employing companies before any tax rises
- [27:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=1670s) Free speech corner — the equality ombudsman will not allow the male-female distinction mentioned in schools
- [33:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2030s) Activists abroad at the taxpayer's expense
- [36:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2215s) Käärijä in the karaoke corner. A tipsy uncle against the joy and light of the prime minister's summer stage
- [38:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2290s) Backstabbing inside the Centre Party before the election
- [41:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2510s) Is the Uusimaa constituency easy or a shark pool? Low election sabotage
- [45:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2730s) Sami's recommendation to vote for Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila
- [46:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2775s) Onni Rostila to parliament, number 341
- [47:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2820s) Tere Sammallahti to parliament, number 78
- [49:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI&t=2985s) Greetings to Ivan from the raider room of the free speech corner

## 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kjp0_Iu0yI).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at
[www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/267-varjoviisasteluklubi-oikeistokaappaus-tere-sammallahti-onni).

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — The Shadow Viisasteluklubi, a Right-Wing Takeover | Tere Sammallahti, Onni Rostila | Neuvottelija 180, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep180-varjoviisasteluklubi-oikeistokaappaus-sammallahti-rostila/, 2023-03-09. For quotes include episode 180 and timestamp.