FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
New post to avoid a mega-post:
The party was originally formed as an agrarian, conservative, right-wing party. It was very small and insignificant until its leader, Timo Soini, started to gain huge popularity. The party moved further to the right until the 2003 elections.
Between the elections of 2003 and 2007, several branches split from the party because they wanted the party to be more anti-EU and further to the right, which Soini wouldn't allow to happen because he's always following the polls and he knew that there were more votes to be gained from the Left. The most radical Right went to these new parties.
In this same period, the SDP practiced politics that left very many of its supporters and members unhappy. They went over to the smaller parties, including a lot of people who joined the Perussuomalaiset because it was the only anti-EU party with any chance of getting seats and thus the only one that could cause changes in national politics. With this influx of ex-SDP people, most of them further to the Left than the SDP itself, the void caused by the exit of the far-right was filled.
Because of the defeat of the SDP and the failures of Right-wing policies carried out by the current government (which is led by Kokoomus and the Centre Party, as the SDP lost many seats in 2007), the SDP has been losing supporters to the Perussuomalaiset at a great rate. Soini, vigilant as always of changes in popular opinion, knew that the Left was growing and that most people who never vote in Finland are supporters of the Left. Thus, he started to copy the fiscal policies of the SDP, and his party is very happy.
In case you're wondering why the Left Alliance and the SDP aren't the largest parties in Finland despite the fact that Leftists are a majority here, it's because of the stigma of Communism in a country that was invaded by the USSR twice and was an almost-but-not-quite-puppet to Moscow from 1945 until 1991. A Leftist party without the word Left, Socialist or Communist in its name can avoid this stigma, especially if it's right-wing about some things.
edited 21st Jan '14 6:13:26 AM by BestOf
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Anwalt der Verdammten
That is pure genius. ![[awesome]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minis/award_star_gold_3.png "[awesome]"){kind=small}
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
What, that most parties support it or the term?
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Anwalt der Verdammten
I meant the term, but both.
The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.
Who Am I?
Awesome. I now have a very clear idea what the issues are. Could you describe what political campaigning is like in Finland? What do you do to get the votes? Are you expecting to win?
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
In Parliamentary elections, the electoral district (of which there are 15) gets a pre-determined (by the constitution) amount of representatives based on population, though with some bias towards less populated regions to avert dictatorship of the majority. So each party (or alliance) has a list of candidates for each district they're running in. Each party's branch in each district supervises the campaign of their own candidates - so the Left Alliance HQ in Helsinki doesn't decide who the Left Alliance in North Karelia (which is where I live) names as our candidates; instead, members of our party, usually the most active ones, apply to become candidates in a meeting and the board decides to put them on the list. There's a limit to how many candidates there can be on a list; the larger the district, the more candidates.
For the most part, campaigning is done by the candidates themselves, their supporters and their party. Depending on the budget of the candidate and the party, there can be advertising, even on national TV and major newspapers, but for most candidates, the main form of campaigning is participation in (and arranging) events or going door-to-door. I and the rest of the group behind Antti's campaign have been going around the suburbs of Joensuu, distributing leaflets (basically dropping them in people's mailboxes - you can distribute something like 30 or 40 in an apartment building, and since our voter base is pretty clear, we can target the areas where our likely voters live and distribute several hundred leaflets per person in a single day.)
Each candidate is ultimately responsible for their own campaign, unless they can afford to hire a campaign manager (or the campaign manager can be a volunteer; I'm officially the manager of Antti's campaign though he's done at least twice as much as me). Each candidate has a budget (that they have to declare to the state when the election's over; election budgets are now public, while in the past they were private.)
Antti's entire budget is less that €2000, half of it coming from the Left Alliance's national department (which decided to give this sum to all candidates who weren't in Parliament before or otherwise very notable, IIRC) Antti also got some money from the Left Youth, but that's about it. In comparison, the bribes that a Kokoomus candidate, Jyri Häkämies, got from a single lobbying group, were €10 000, and it's nowhere near the highest bribes that were discovered in the investigations regarding the previous elections. So Antti's campaign is very grassroots.
The Left Alliance currently doesn't have a seat from North Karelia, and while our official goal is 2 seats, it's not realistic. We might get one, but for Antti to be the one, he'd have to get more votes than anyone else on our list (i.e., the list of the Left Alliance in North Karelia). That means that he'd have to get about 1 000 votes if everyone else on our list gets at least half a thousand or so. Not very good at math so I might be wrong about that, though.
Without a lot of people moving over from the undecided or other parties to the Left in North Karelia, we're likely not going to get a single candidate through, but since this election is likely to be the most active one in recent history because of the stir-up caused by the Perussuomalaiset and a couple of other recent developments (EU bailout, merger of 2 universities into the University of Eastern Finland, stuff like that), we're expecting a higher voter turnout than most elections. Because most of the "sleeping voters" (which is a term used to refer to people who don't vote even though they have a party they support) are on the Left, we're also expecting a larger share of the total votes. So there's a chance Antti will pass, but it's more likely that someone else from our list will pass instead, and about as likely that we won't get a seat.
Nationally, our party has 17 of the 200 seats. It is the 4th-largest party.
The largest party in Parliament is Kokoomus, with 51 seats. Keskusta has 50, the SDP has 45, the Green League has 15, the Swedes have 9, the True Finns (Perussuomalaiset) have 5, the Christian Democrats have 7 and the Åland autonomous district got their 1 representative from one of their own parties.
Here's a link
to the Wikipedia article on the current election; it'll open at poll results, so you'll get a look at the current popularity of each party. The most notable change is the growth of the True Finns from 4.9% in 2007 to 17.2% this month, though the figure is exaggerated because of the huge media attention the party has been getting recently and because people who don't vote often cite it as their party, so their actual number of votes never matches what the polls would indicate.
edited 21st Jan '14 6:14:26 AM by BestOf
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I see the Awesomeness.
Dunno, both
and the nuclear stance are deal breakers for me, if I were voting in your election.
Fight smart, not fair.
I support pretty much everything in your manifesto apart from the nuclear bit, but that's not even close to being a deal breaker for me.
Any chance you guys would come to Northern Ireland so that there would be at least one candidate in my area that's actually worth voting for? The sad part is, I'm not even really joking when I say that.
I voted in advance two days ago.
It was for a member of the Finnish Communist party.
I really hope "The True Finns" don't make it into the administration. They represent a desperate attempt to cash in on people's racism and bigotry.
-
In the last municipal election, I voted for a very prominent Green Party member, but now I'm voting for new candidates as a rule, since I wish for there to be some new blood in Finnish politics for a change.
edited 8th Apr '11 3:27:30 AM by Kerrah
"True true finns" sounds like the opening line of a fish based musical number.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
About the nuclear thing, from one of my posts in another thread (I already linked the post here but meh.)
As for safety: it's a totally new kind of plant, lauded as the safest in the world, but that doesn't mean a thing as the production has been outsourced and sub-contracted so many times that it's impossible for the officials to keep track, and when eventually inspectors have managed to access the site - which has been made difficult by the construction company's lack of understanding about the protocol of these check-ups, as they assumed they'd be warned beforehand, which of course is silly - there have been many flaws in the construction, mostly made by untrained workers or hurried production, resulting in that parts of the building have had to be re-built from scratch, eliminating the speed gain or the claims of security.
So the stuff that's been going on with Olkiluoto-3 is the main reason our party thinks that nuclear is not doable here. I'm sure you'll agree that having to rebuild parts of a nuclear plant that's already 3 years late - because someone's subcontractor's subcontractor's subcontractor tried to save money by doing everything the cheapest way possible without regard to safety - is not a good sign.
There are 16 languages spoken in the construction site because the subcontractors are buying labour from around Europe based solely on cost. I've heard that for some of the workers there, this is the first time they've worked in construction, and most supervisors in the site only know 1 or 2 of the other languages spoken.
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rrrrrrrrr
Aggressively cutting costs is not a good idea where nuclear safety is concerned.
Sakamoto demands an explanation for this shit.
If the reactor fails, the constructors don't have to pay for it, so why should they care for making it so that it lasts?
rrrrrrrrr
Since it got caught this early, their paychecks should be refunded. Were it to actually result in problems down the road they would (in most countries) be under criminal charges for endangering the public.
edited 8th Apr '11 8:48:44 AM by GoggleFox
Sakamoto demands an explanation for this shit.
Ohhh, that explains a lot. In which I would say that your stance shouldn't be an embargo on nuclear power but setting up a program to improve government contracting.
Nuclear power isn't the problem, it's shitty irresponsible builders.
I see the Awesomeness.
Better.
Anyway, there's a difference between taking a stance against this nuclear plant, and taking a stance against nuclear power in general.
Fight smart, not fair.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
Well, the discussion about nuclear vs renewable is in the renewables thread, right?
Our party has calculated that we'd be better off building renewables in the first place, since we can afford it and have sources available.
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I have to ask, is it common in Finland to have people as young as your friend standing for parliament?
It's absolutely unheard of over here.
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
Well, it's not exactly common, but it's not very rare, either. The youngest person who got elected in 2007 was 22 at the time IIRC.
The average age of a Finnish MP is 52. Most people are really fed up with having a disproportionately large number of old people in Parliament, but it's a result of the higher political experience of older candidates and the fact that the "baby boomer" generation in Finland is huge, referred to as "the large (or huge) generation". One of the problems Finland is facing at the moment is the huge amounts of people getting retired annually because the baby boomers are at retirement age, so there's going to be a shortage of available labour after a year or two.
Most parties, especially Leftist ones, have mostly older people running for Parliament and as a consequence most Leftist MPs are also old. The Left Alliance has made a conscious effort to recruit more candidates from the Left Youth (which officially is not connected to the Left Alliance but in reality it is; for example, in Joensuu (which is where I live), the Left Youth and the Left Alliance have a shared office and most active members in the Youth organisation are also active in the party.)
Out of the 14 candidates we're running in North Karelia, 5 are under 30. Antti is the youngest of the bunch, at 21. I'm pretty sure that we're almost the youngest party by average candidate age out of the ones running with any chance of getting anyone passed. This is because we're undergoing a generation shift, which is long overdue.
We're not the youngest party, though; that would be the Pirates, who probably have candidates under 20 and whose voters are likely to be at least 90% under 35.
edited 21st Jan '14 6:15:05 AM by BestOf
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Who Am I?
Well, given that, how are pensions handled in Finland? Are they provided by the state?
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Who else would provide them?
No, that's a serious question. I've never heard of or imagined a pension system that's not organised by the state.
edited 10th Apr '11 10:06:00 AM by Kerrah
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
A part of your salary automatically goes to the Social Insurance Institution (in Finnish: Kansaneläkelaitos, or People's Pension Agency), which handles pensions, most forms of social support and health insurance for the entire population, but lots of people (though I don't know how many; probably less than half) also invest in private pension funds, which sometimes invest poorly and lose the savings of the investors. They're still covered by the state, though.
Your pension usually is about 80% of what you got when you were working - or at least, that's how much it is in theory, but because of various policies that affect it, some get as little as 60% of what they were earning when they were working, so there are problems with our pension system.
Our party plans to replace all pensions under €750/month with the guaranteed minimum income system we're proposing, so no one over 18 would have to live with less than that. We're probably not going to achieve that in the next government even if we get in (which would mean that we or parties that like us win). We'd need the SDP, probably the Centre, the Greens and us to make a majority, and even then Kokoomus and "True Finns" might have a majority if we do poorly, so let's hope for the best!
Oh, actually, I don't think I've explained how governments are formed in Finland. Here goes:
After the election results are in, parties start rounds of negotiations with each other (though there usually is a lot of negotiations before the election, too).
Historically, 2 (usually the 2 that came on top in terms of seats in Parliament but sometimes #s 1 and 3 or even 2 and 3) out of the "Big Three" (SDP, Centre, Kokoomus or, as the Euronews called them when the results of Finland's European Parliament elections came in, "Centre-Left, Centre and Centre-Right") would agree on a plan they can work with for the next 4 years.
When 2 out of the Big Three parties agreed with a plan, each compromising where they could, they'd do a round of negotiations with the smaller parties, adjusting the plan to accommodate them until the new government has a majority in Parliament. The Swedes are willing to vote in favour of anything except the removal of mandatory Swedish from our schools, so they're the only party that is guaranteed to be in Parliament.
So a government is usually composed of 2 big parties plus 2 or 3 small ones, totalling more than 100 seats, and the opposition would be 1 big and several small parties. The current government has Keskusta and Kokoomus as the big guys and the Swedes and the Greens as the smaller parties, while the SDP, the Christians, the True Finns and we are in the opposition.
This election, things will be different, as now there are 4 big parties (with True Finns as one of them). So after the results are in, we might have to deal with a minority government. Or the old Big Three will form a majority government and not get anything done 'cause 3 big parties in a single government will not work.
The best that can happen is the SDP plus the Centre as the big ones, with the Greens, Swedes and us in government, leaving the Christians, Kokoomus and the True Finns in the opposition. A government like this might have a majority.
The worst that can happen is Kokoomus, True Finns, Christians and Swedes in government, with SDP, Centre and us in the opposition.
edited 21st Jan '14 6:21:56 AM by BestOf
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FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
I'm surprised that no one's asked how many women we have in Parliament. I think this is an important topic, even for people who don't really care about Finland, so I'm going to talk about this a bit...
The first Parliamentary elections in Finland were held in 1907, when Finland was still an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia. Our Parliament back then was the highest domestic authority on Finnish matters (which it still is), but the Russian Governor-General of Finland, appointed by the Tsar, had the authority to overrule our Parliament if he so chose.
In the first election, everyone over the age of 18 could vote. Thus, we were the first country in Europe to allow women to vote. Only Australia and New Zealand (which were both also members of a larger empire at the time) had granted women suffrage earlier than us, and only Australia had held elections where women could run for office before us. In the election of 1907, out of the 200 representatives, 19 were female. They were the first female MPs in the world, as New Zealand hadn't allowed women to run and in Australia, no women were elected.
Our first female President was Tarja Halonen (SDP), who was elected in 2000 and again in 2006. Because she has soon served 2 consecutive terms, she is not allowed to run in the next Presidential elections, which will be held in 2012.
Our first female Prime Minister was Anneli Jäätteenmäki (Centre), who was elected in 2003 but only held the office for 3 months because she had lied (about the previous Prime Minister, SDP's Paavo Lipponen, having promised to send Finnish troops to Iraq in a meeting with Bush; in reality, Lipponen only said that we might take part in a peacekeeping operation after the war is over) during her campaign and was caught. (In case I haven't mentioned this before, the Prime Minister is usually the chairperson of the party that has the most seats in Parliament, though it's not mandated by law.)
Our current Prime Minister, Mari Kiviniemi (Centre), took office on 22 June 2010 after the previous Prime Minister, Matti Vanhanen (Centre), resigned because of corruption charges (though he claims he resigned due to family reasons). This is frustrating because Vanhanen became Prime Minister when Jäätteenmäki resigned, so he wasn't exactly chosen by the people when he took office in 2003. He did lead his party to victory in 2007, so that's when he got a mandate from the people. The current Prime Minister wasn't the head of the party during election either, so now 2 of our previous 3 Prime Ministers have been appointed (by the Centre party) without an election. I got sidetracked... But yeah, Kiviniemi is the second female Prime Minister under President Halonen.
In the current Parliament, 40% of the MPs (79 out of 200) are women. In the election of 2007, 84 women were elected; during the 4 years this Parliament has served, 5 women have resigned (most due to being elected to the European Parliament in 2009) or died and been replaced by men.
Out of the 8 parties with seats in Parliament, 4 have a female chairperson. Out of the Big Three, the Centre and SDP have a female chairperson, but as the True Finns are likely to be the 4th "Big", 50% of the big parties will be led by women unless there are changes in party leadership.
Most parties have more men than women as candidates, but it is probably a coincidence or a result of men with previous political experience from a time when men were over-represented due to sexism getting elected because of their experience rather than their sex. The Left Alliance has more women than men as members, but for some reason, we have more men as candidates. We were actually pretty surprised by this, as we were expecting to have more women as candidates when we were putting our lists together for the election.
edited 21st Jan '14 6:16:00 AM by BestOf
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I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how pensions could work without the government paying them.
By the way, Best Of, you've put a lot of hard work into this thread. Thumbs up for helping people for free.
While I'm at it, here's the platform of the Left Alliance:
1. Labour policy:
-Put an end to underground economy by forcing general contractors to keep track of subcontractors, including making sure that everyone gets at least minimum wage and illegal workers aren't used.
-Proper collectively bargained work conditions for temporary and hired labour.
-€10/hr minimum wage mandated by law.
2. Taxation according to wealth:
-No taxes for people with an income of less than €10 000/year.
-Tax capital gain like wage.
-Install financial transaction taxation.
-Instead of cutting spending, increase tax base.
3. Guaranteed livelihood for everyone:
-Minimum security of €750/month.
-Move towards basic income guarantee by removing welfare bureaucracy.
4. Health is not for sale:
-Install a payment ceiling of €650 per year per person, so that everything beyond that is free, be it medicine, healthcare, or travel to and from treatment facilities.
-Focus on pre-emptive treatment in mental health and substance abuse problems.
-Make services for the elderly more humane.
5. Public transport should be cheap and easy:
-Increase reliability, quality and lines (as in, routes a bus or train takes and the times the bus or train travels per day).
-Lower ticket prices.
-Put Finland on the rails. (This means that we should focus on expanding and improving our rail network and the services of the National Railway Corporation.)
6. Equal education:
-Free education from kindergarten to University. (Currently, there are no tuition fees in Universities, but it has been suggested that there should be an annual fee.)
-Free books in high schools and vocational schools. (In both high school and vocational schools, the students have to buy their own books, whereas books are free throughout mandatory education.)
-Comprehensive school must be equal (meaning that differences between regions and municipalities should be minor).
-Art and culture are basic human rights. (It means we want to increase education in the arts.)
7. Time for parenthood:
-Implement a new model of parental leave. (I have to specify a bit: in the current model, when a child is born, the mother gets a paid leave from about a week before the child's birth to about 3 months after birth; after this, the parental leave begins. The parental leave is about 6 months, and it can be split between the mother and the father, though usually the mother uses most or all of it. In the model proposed by us, the parental leave (including the leave the mother gets at the start) is 18 months; 6 months for each parent plus 6 months that they can split however they like.
-Install a locum service for entrepreneurs. (So that the business will have a substitute running it for the duration of parental leave.)
8. Pension must be enough to support a good life:
-We must not raise the retirement age from 63.
-Pensions must suffice for a decent life.
9. Equality:
-Same rights and duties for everyone.
10. Climate justice:
-We mustn't leave the climate to the corporations' mercy.
-No more nuclear power should be built.
11. Knowledge is power - information must belong to everyone:
-Right to knowledge. (Meaning that information produced with public funding should always be available for everyone.)
-Open source programs in public government.
-Copyright practices to be reformed.
12. Housing costs must be brough down:
-We must increase construction to an annual rate of 30 000 homes.
13. Welfare for the entire country:
-Regional development without market forces (used Google Translate for that particular expression, but the original Finnish basically means "powers/forces of the market" so I just went with it).
14. Responsible security policy:
-No to NATO.
-Out of Afghanistan. (To elaborate: There's a Finnish peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. When it was launched, our party supported it, but according to Finnish officers, the mission has changed from a peacekeeping operation into us being a participant in a civil war, so the Left Alliance wants us to leave the operation.)
edited 21st Jan '14 6:12:46 AM by BestOf
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