The Right-Wing Government Pulled It Off! | Marko Junkkari | Neuvottelija 196

Summary

Marko Junkkari — political journalist at Helsingin Sanomat and a regular on the Uutisraportti podcast — assesses Petteri Orpo’s forming government the day before the government programme was published.

The starting point: unusually few leaks

The premise is unusual and the episode says so: there is no programme yet, and everything said has a shelf life of a couple of days. Junkkari’s picture is that over two months there have been very few leaks — only in the last week or two somewhat more, and even then few. Miettinen notes that ministries yield material because the openness act obliges them to disclose, with some delay, what has been asked of them. Junkkari’s qualification: those are not leaks, but they tell you which subject areas are being worked. The comparison is stark — in the past somebody would text from the negotiating table almost in real time.

What was eventually written into the programme is outside this episode. Everything below is the state of knowledge, and the judgement, at the time of recording.

A dispute about the name: right-wing or bourgeois

Miettinen calls the forming government a right-wing government and justifies it by saying Finland is embarrassed by the word — having lived thirteen years in the Anglo-Saxon world he finds the embarrassment ridiculous. Junkkari says he prefers porvarihallitus, a bourgeois government, but not on principle: it is simply a funnier word with a historical ring. On substance he agrees: on the values map this is a government further to the economic right than its predecessor.

Miettinen’s argument is that right-wing politics needs normalising so that people stop silently prefixing it with “far”; he recalls the outcry four years earlier when the parliamentary parties moved the Finns Party to sit on the right of the chamber. Junkkari’s aside on seating is telling: it descends from the French parliament, and the television cameras used to be on the speaker’s right — these days there are cameras on both sides.

The values map and its limits

Miettinen says he disliked Helsingin Sanomat’s values map during the campaign but has warmed to it: all 108 government MPs sit in practice on the right. Junkkari points out that the division is not the paper’s invention but GAL–TAN, used by researchers — and is itself problematic. His concrete counter-example: greenness is one variable, and it is not obviously commensurable with whether children may be physically disciplined at school, which is another of the questions.

On group dynamics his reading: the Swedish People’s Party group splits as one would expect (Ostrobothnia more conservative, Uusimaa, Southwest Finland and Helsinki more liberal), while the Finns Party group is a tighter cluster a fraction to the left of the National Coalition but clearly on the values-conservative side.

Three market liberalisations

Junkkari identifies three liberalisation themes.

1. The gambling monopoly. Parliamentary unanimity has been reached and there is no going back: Veikkaus’s digital games will be opened to competition. Neither a surprise nor a dispute.
2. Pharmacies. Three possible changes. An online pharmacy’s stock must currently sit in a bricks-and-mortar pharmacy, which removes the entire logistical point of online retail — this will apparently be dismantled. The requirement that only a licensed pharmacist may own a pharmacy is, in Junkkari’s characterisation, guild-like and a powerful barrier to market entry; he expects, and rather hopes for, its removal. Sales of over-the-counter medicines in grocery shops are unlikely, though nicotine products are already sold there.
3. Alcohol. A rise from 5.5 per cent to 8, and possibly liberalisation of foreign and distance selling — the latter appearing to be a threshold issue for the Christian Democrats.

Miettinen finds the pharmacy arrangement absurd: a personal-ownership requirement, a regional monopoly, and still the right to set up a limited company at the same premises selling groceries. Junkkari adds that Kesko and the S Group have lobbied the matter hard.

A disagreement about impact assessments

This is the clearest disagreement in the episode, and both mark their positions as their own. Miettinen says he does not trust the ministry of social affairs and health as a producer of market analysis, and regards the alcohol line as individual civil servants freelancing; the finance ministry is more reliable in his eyes. The form of his argument matters: if you want a science-based government, do you walk over a ministry’s best assessment when that assessment is compromised?

Junkkari does not endorse this. He has written a piece on how THL’s alcohol forecasts went wrong on the previous liberalisation, and has had sharp exchanges about it — but in his account THL’s view came to match reality over a longer period, and it did not go totally astray. Both agree on one variable: the drinking habits of younger Finns have genuinely changed dramatically.

Housing allowance — the mechanism determines the incidence

The sharpest single piece of analysis in the episode. A cut of around €350 million is coming to the housing allowance. One idea is to move students out of the general housing allowance into which Sipilä’s government moved them — around 40 per cent of the allowance goes to students, clearly the largest group. Another is to remove the €300 earned-income deduction, and Junkkari suspects that is what is being done.

Why it matters: one of the party leaders has said the cut does not fall on the very lowest incomes. That claim is odd, in Junkkari’s view, because high earners do not receive housing allowance at all — but if the mechanism is specifically the removal of the income deduction, then it falls not on the unemployed but on those with some earned income. The mechanism determines the incidence, not the size of the cut.

Miettinen offers the opposite example: Otaniemi is statistically one of Finland’s lowest-income areas even though it houses the high earners of the future. Junkkari also notes that assets are not currently taken into account in a housing allowance decision.

Zigzag: Finland has moved to bloc politics

The strongest structural claim in the episode is Junkkari’s. When three large parties took turns in government, the combination was almost always partly the same and a new government continued where the last left off: things moved slowly but in one direction — dreary for the voter, but stable. Since the rise of the Finns Party in 2011 and the breaking of the three big parties’ monopoly, policy zigzags: Sipilä, then the red-green Rinne–Marin government, now a right-wing government again.

The concrete evidence: Rinne announced a paradigm shift in 2019 and added nearly €1.5 billion of permanent spending in the government negotiations — before the crises — plus hundreds of millions of “future investments” on top, of which Junkkari asks whether adding vocational-school teachers is a temporary investment. And in the other direction: reversing the previous government’s decisions was not part of the old convention, but now it is discussed — on the day of recording, the nurse staffing ratio is not to be reversed but postponed.

Taxes, VAT and the scale of the cuts

Miettinen’s programme is direct: the tax rate rose from 41.8 to 43.2 under the previous government, so a right-wing government ought to bring it down; the two per cent “temporary” solidarity tax, alive for ten years, could end, since Sweden cut five percentage points off its marginal rate without a change in tax revenue. On VAT his proposal is 24 → 22 and 10 → 14, in the direction of Denmark’s single rate. Junkkari judges that the National Coalition’s billion-euro income tax cut is not coming, and notes the opposing argument: spending hundreds of millions compensating petrol prices at the pump while raising the reduced VAT rate on food is a ready-made line for the opposition.

On scale: if of a six-billion target two billion comes from employment measures, two from health and social care and efficiency, and two from direct cuts, then two billion in direct cuts is a great deal — Sipilä’s government cut a little over a billion, and Junkkari asks whether Miettinen remembers the outcry.

The Finns Party, the unions and universal applicability

Junkkari’s characterisation of the Finns Party is two-sided and important: they are Finland’s largest workers’ party — considerably more blue-collar members than the Social Democrats, plus small entrepreneurs and taxi drivers — and social security cuts therefore land on their own base. At the same time, in an EVA study they were second only to the National Coalition in favouring tax cuts, and a more recent study finds the party has become markedly more market-friendly over roughly the last six years.

On union matters his assessment: the right to political strike is unlikely to be banned, strike fines will probably rise, and the Finns Party’s Matti Putkonen sits in these working groups defending union interests. Universal applicability of collective agreements will not be abolished categorically, but local bargaining will be expanded.

Miettinen says he has regarded universal applicability as close to a human rights violation — one group agrees a deal and outsiders are bound by it on worse terms — but immediately concedes the other side: because collective agreements settle increases rather than minimum wages, the alternative to universal applicability would be a statutory minimum wage that the left would push high. In that sense he admits some sympathy for the present arrangement.

Health and social care, and a fourth level of taxation

Both treat health and social care as the episode’s most wicked problem: a nursing shortage, deteriorating services, queues and regional disparities alongside cost containment, and in the negotiations the Swedish People’s Party defending the services of Pietarsaari hospital to the last.

On taxation powers they disagree and say so. Junkkari: if the current model is kept, the wellbeing services counties must get taxation powers, because otherwise they have no incentive to reckon their own income and expenditure. Miettinen: a fourth level of taxation should not be introduced in Finland, because here taxes can only ever rise — “it is like a fish trap”. Junkkari concedes the spread between small and large counties would be wide.

Miettinen also mentions having interviewed Sari Essayah, who staked out her opposition to taxation powers; his reading of her logic is that she wants the state to keep subsidising health services in the border regions.

The opposition and the EU

Junkkari’s analysis of the opposition is profile by profile: the Greens hold the climate cards, the Social Democrats and the Left Alliance the card of the worker being pushed around, the Centre the card of the regions being forgotten. Antti Lindtman will almost certainly take the Social Democrat leadership, and in Junkkari’s assessment he is to Marin’s right and starts from a more positive view of companies and industry.

On the EU he raises three things. On the restoration regulation, Finland’s hope for sympathy on carbon sinks is in his view a hopeless request — the argument that euroscepticism will otherwise grow does not work. Of the support packages, a Ukraine package is probably coming (for which Finland has more understanding) and the harder sovereignty fund, and for both the open question is whether new borrowing is taken on or existing unused lending authority is used. The votes are hard for the Finns Party; one theoretical way out would be to agree them as conscience votes, but then the packages might fall. Miettinen’s answer to that is calm: then the EU will start improving the packages.

The broadest worry is protectionism: the United States is subsidising its own green transition with billions, the EU follows and state aid rules are loosened, whereupon France and Germany subsidise their own industry — which is especially harmful to a small peripheral country. Both land in the same place: Finland cannot prosper riding protectionism.

Closing

Ministerial speculation stays speculation. Junkkari judges that the Christian Democrats will not get more than one minister, and reports a rumour that the Swedish People’s Party might elevate Markus Rantala. On the presidential election his forecast is that no candidate will take more than 20 per cent in the first round, making it the hardest task simply to reach the second — and that a strengthening right–left division may show there.

The episode ends lighter: Junkkari has finished Succession and House of the Dragon and has been reading about Trump’s Florida documents indictment. Asked whether Succession has any basis in reality, he answers that it is the King Lear drama filmed again and very nearly pure fiction — except for the American political games, which are close to the truth.