New elections demanded in Finland over campaign crisis

[Tiriol]

Finnish political opposition demand new parliamentary elections over campaign spending crisis that has dominated the headlines for the past month or so; as reported by YLE News.

Opposition Demands New Elections; PM Stands Firm

Demands to dissolve parliament and for calling of new elections have been made from many parts of the political spectrum following the furor over election campaign spending. The Chair of the Social Democratic parliamentary group Tarja Filatov has called for Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen's resignation. However, Vanhanen has rejected the demand.

She plans to call a meeting of opposition parliamentary groups on Thursday to discuss the situation. Although the party’s final view on the issue remains to be decided, Filatov has been joined in her call for new elections by the SDP’s Deputy Chairman Jukka Gustafsson. He described the current situation as “a crisis of the democratic system.”

Filotov has been more cautious in her words but expressed her doubts at the ability of the Prime Minister to manage the nation’s economy while being unable to determine the source of his campaign funding.

Vanhanen Rejects Opposition Election Demands

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen does not feel that it would be necessary to dissolve Parliament over the election campaign funding controversy.

Vanhanen, who is currently on a visit to the United States, said in Washington on Tuesday that the Centre Party is not in a crisis, even though MP Antti Kaikkonen felt compelled to resign from his position as chairman of the Youth Foundation on Tuesday.

Vanhanen said that he feels that it is necessary to reform Finland’s system of election campaign funding. He says that there should be a ceiling placed on individual contributions.

Former Centre Party MP Jukka Vihriälä, who yesterday resigned from his post as Chairman of the Board of the Finnish Slot Machine Association RAY, said in an interview with MTV3 that the dissolution of Parliament and early elections would be in order.

Vihriälä’s resignation followed revelations that a foundation that had contributed money to his Parliamentary election campaign had received a grant from the Youth Foundation linked with the Centre Party, which has received grants from RAY.

Finance Minister: Calls for Early Elections “Irresponsible”

Minister of Finance Jyrki Katainen, who is also the chairman of the National Coalition Party, feels that calls for early elections are irresponsible in the current economic situation.

Katainen told YLE that Finland does not have the time to stop the Finnish decision-making system for several months in the current situation.

Sasi: Elections May be Necessary

No demands for new elections are been from most governing coalition partners. However, The Chairman of the Parliamentary Constitutional Law Committee, National Coalition Party MP Kimmo Sasi, says that early elections may be necessary if the number of Parliamentarians tainted by the election funding scandal grows very much.

In an interview on YLE Radio, Sasi said that if about 20 Members of Parliament have failed to file a proper disclosure of election funding, it will not necessarily be enough to require new elections.

“If this furor grows, and there are situations, in which people have acted in a morally very questionable manner, and if the group gets to be relatively large, the threshold might be exceeded. So far this has not happened.

Greens Break Government Ranks

Green League Vice Chairman Jyrki Kasvi hopes that President Halonen would put forward a proposal to hold new elections. His views echo those of Green MEP Satu Hassi. Green League chairwoman, Minister of Labour Anni Sinnemäki, is more cautious.

“The channeling of money from the Youth Foundation, which receives support from the Slot Machine Association and the state, into the election coffers of Centre Party politicians, and even to those of the Youth Foundation’s own chairman and the Slot Machine Association’s Chairman of the Board certainly hit bottom on Kasvi’s open incomprehensibility scale,” Kasvi wrote in his blog.

Green League Chairwoman Anni Sinnemäki did not want to take a stand on the issue on Wednesday morning. On a morning programme on MTV3, Sinnemäki said that new elections would not be possible until reforms on election financing are enacted: “otherwise we would be in the same situation as before”.

YLE

The furor over this whole mess has continued in one form or another since 2008 and it looks like it's only getting worse. I'm a little bit torn about this issue: on the other hand, without any outside financing, only the rich candidates would have any hope of getting elected (since their campaigns would be the well-funded ones); however, it becomes pretty iffy when politicians don't report who are their funders and then proceed to make decisions that directly concern their financial backers' interest. And it all seems to incarnate in the form of our current Prime Minister, who apparently wishes that we would still live in President Kekkonen's time when all political decisions and deals were pretty much made away from the public eye and scrutiny.

[Edi]

The plain English translation of this article to a short form is thus:

Social Democratic Party: "WAAAAAAAAHHHH!"

Because that's all it really is. The SDP is always getting its panties in a twist every time it's not the party holding the premiership.

It's not as if they are any cleaner than National Coalition or the Center Party (aka Rural Bumpkins), the sources of their crooked funding just happen to be different. Such as getting support from unions, whose membership fees are tax deductible and unions generally give to the SDP regardless of what the rank and file membership thinks, resulting in a de facto taxpayer funded subsidy for SDP. Fuck them.

The good thing about this is that the election financing scandal has blown open several of the various Good Old Boy networks and is forcing an accountability that was largely absent previously. Though that's relative, since we do have regulations in place.

To put this in context for our foreign friends, we're talking about sums ranging from 25k euros to 150k euros for prime minister candidates and all told something on the order of max 500k euros for a party, which qualifies as chump change on a national level campaign in the US, for example. Here, an undisclosed 50k that came from dubious sources will see an ominous waving of pitchforks and a torch here and there. Bigger sums and it gets uglier.

The way the parties have handled it, stalling and stonewalling and covering up as much as they could before having to bend to the inevitable has done nobody any favors. The National Coalition should just let the former Finance Minister Niinistö handle all the public statements, because Katainen (party chairman and current Finance Minister) just can't hack it on that front. Puts his foot in his mouth with amazing regularity when faced with a tough question.

[Karza]

The way the parties have handled it, stalling and stonewalling and covering up as much as they could before having to bend to the inevitable has done nobody any favors.

This is the most infuriating thing about the whole affair. When a thing like this hits the news, it should be obvious to anyone with a brain that every last dirty detail will be dug up sooner or later anyway. Stalling will just convince everyone that you're not only an asshole, but a moron.

I won't damn a politician for taking campaign donations from businessmen or whatnot. Like Tiriol said, the not-rich candidates' campaign financing has to come from somewhere. But why oh why couldn't they be fucking honest about it?

(Probably because then they'd be disqualified from making decisions directly affecting their benefactors. Oh well.)

[Vendetta]

Stalling will just convince everyone that you're not only an asshole, but a moron.

"We have nothing to hide, but don't look behind the curtain".

[Edi]

It's also rather incredible how the political parties and individual politicians simply seem not to have wised up to how the media operates in Finland. Helsingin Sanomat for example tends to do a lot of painstaking, meticulous background work, often for weeks beforehand, digging up a massive amount of dirt before they do anything. Once they actually come froward with the information, it's often a fairly innocuous question about something improper, phrased in a way that makes the target think they're just fishing. The target denies the charge, blows it off and possibly even accuses the media of being out to dig dirt and...

...KABOOM!!!

go the headlines the next day and they'll be lucky not to make the evening news on TV in the aftermath. HS has been doing this for decades and YLE and MTV3 are equally bloodthirsty. And it works every single time. All the better, that, but it just amazes me how they never learn.

[His Divine Shadow]

It all seems a bit naive to me. Ofcourse business interests will give money to the parties that can do the most for them, it's no more strange than that the SDP gets loads of cash from the various unions. No point in covering it up or acting bashful about.