The Government After Sanna Marin | Jari Hanska | Neuvottelija 186

A note on reading this

The guest is a political journalist rather than a party representative, and his role is to analyse rather than defend a position. Both speakers nonetheless offer opinions, marked as such below. The episode was recorded two days after the vote, so the discussion of government composition is speculation rather than outcome.

Summary

Jari Hanska of Iltalehti came on two days after Finland’s April 2023 election, on the day Finland became a NATO member.

The important number is the losers’, not the winners’. The three largest parties gained twenty seats between them, and all of them came from the Centre, the Greens and the Left Alliance — parties that had themselves been in government. “The damage of governing landed on them.” Hanska rejects tactical voting as the explanation, pointing to constituencies where both the Left Alliance and the Social Democrats lost a seat while the Finns Party rose. Miettinen’s counterweight, that bloc logic clearly operated in Uusimaa where the last candidate left out was from the Left Alliance, is left standing beside it. For the Left Alliance the lasting consequence is three constituencies with no sitting MP at all, which makes rebuilding a candidacy there much harder.

Minority government gets an unusually concrete airing. Miettinen proposes a Danish-style experiment: a hundred-seat base, the speaker’s chair to the opposition, and support sought law by law rather than through coalition. Hanska’s answer is constitutional — the constitution and its preparatory materials push the system towards a parliamentary majority, and a minority is the option of last resort. He does not call it impossible, and sets out the trade: committee leads, including in opposition, would gain real power, and predictability would fall, which matters if something like a consolidation programme has to land inside a set window. He also explains why a majority wants 120 rather than 101 seats: ministers are often absent on official business and the speaker is another seat gone.

Campaigning has moved and journalism has not followed. Journalists watch Twitter while the campaign is fought on TikTok, and Hanska’s point is that this changes how politics is done rather than merely where it is seen. Miettinen adds that YouTube is as influential and has few left-leaning Finnish channels.

He argues the Finns Party should govern, on administrative rather than political grounds: opposition rhetoric does not survive contact with the need to produce a coherent programme. He judges the party would want the Centre alongside it, having just taken the Centre’s traditional regions — while conceding the Centre may find opposition the easier route to winning them back, at the cost of being tarred with the bloc it leaves behind.

On Marin as a communicator both credit the refusal to apologise or retreat. Hanska’s sharper observation is about delegation on large international files such as Uniper, which he reads as shielding — grounded in Antti Rinne having fallen precisely by being too close to the postal dispute.

The episode closes on a naming culture Hanska describes symmetrically — one flank is instantly fascism, the other instantly socialism — and on his deeper worry that framing of that kind ends in questioning plain facts. The last observation is the best: on the Finnish compass the economically left-wing value conservative corner is empty, though voters for it probably exist.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Sanna Marinin jälkeinen hallitus | Jari Hanska | Neuvottelija 186. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.