Sivun toiminnot
Discovering Finnish Democracy
In less than 2 weeks Finns will be going to the polls to elect a new government. I had the unique experience of walking around Helsinki in the past days trying to understand this rather complex elector system and trying even harder to understand the issues that the voters must decide on. In Helsinki you see very organized billboards with posters for each of the political parties running in the elections. You see the faces of the candidates from each party but there is no mention of the issues at all, with the exception of one of the Labour parties that has a small caricature on it depicting the government cutting budgets and government provided social services. The voters do have an opportunity to seek out information about the parties because all over Helsinki one encounters small booths for each one of the parties with people handing out flyers and brochures and in this cold weather, even more important, offering a cup of coffee or tea. In the booth of the Green Party they offered Fair Trade coffee which was nice to see.
I asked people standing outside of the booths about their party and what they were offering the voters. Quite surprising, very similar to the situation in Israel, many of the people were not party activists but rather people, who were in most cases party members, but they were standing there in the cold because they were being paid. They really didn’t know how to answer my questions, probably because most by-passers don’t ask questions – they take the leaflets and move on. But I wanted to understand what the issues were and what answers they provided.
One party representative from a center party, right of the current government, as they described themselves – after much probing from me remembered that his party thought that the main problem facing Finland is a deficit which is too large. I asked him then if they wanted to cut budgets or increase taxes. Of course he said, cut government spending, when I asked him what they wanted to cut – education? Health? Welfare? He responded “no, not education. No, not health, etc.” Then he remembered – the EU – “we don’t like Europe”. That was about as much I could get out of him.
On Sunday, it was nice to find that in many of the booths there were some actual candidates present. It was nice to see that because in the Finnish electoral system you actually cast a vote for a person and not for a political party. In most cases, from observation there was actually a real sense that they cared about the voters and I think that those people were met the candidates had a feeling that their voted really counted.
One of the disturbing things about the elections in Finland now is the rise of the far right-wing party, which I understand has a social-democratic social-economic agenda coupled with a racist xenophobic agenda on issues of immigration and foreign. The party is called “The Real Finns”. The public opinion polls are giving them about 15% of the Parliament. This disturbing trend of racist xenophobic parties is sweeping across Europe and far away Finland with only about 3% foreigners is not immune to this phenomenon.
The writer is the Co-CEO of IPCRI, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information and is now in the process of founding the Center for Israeli Progress. Gershon Baskin was in Finland participating in a seminar on “Facilitating Political Dialogue in the Baltico-Mediterranean Axis” organized by Kehys the Finnish NGDO Platform to the EU.