/suomi/ - Finland

Soini is a left-wing populist, but a smart one. I'd even say he is probably on the top five smartest Finnish politicians (which unfortunately isn't saying much). He understands economics but focuses too much on how to explain it to people who don't understand it at all. This causes him to dumb down his rhetoric to such a degree that it sounds stupid to someone who actually understands what the issues are.

He had a good thing going on, but managed to fumble it by being too sure about being on the next government and by stating to be a buddy-buddy with the three other large parties.

Then about the party formerly known as True Finns, currently know as The Finns Party. Finland has traditionally had a political system where all the parties meet in closed sessions (called the Wednesday-club) and negotiate with each other about what to do. This is what we call Finnish Consensus.

There they trade with issues: we'll support A if you support B. You'll support C if we promise not to touch D.

After the meeting they meet the press telling that they have reached a consensus. Everyone agrees that the only possible way forward is that we do A, B, C and not D.

The clever bit is that since all the parties have now committed to all the issues, the voter has no way to tell who actually supports what. Therefore he cannot punish his own party for doing something against his interest. Issues that all parties "agree" on and to which the voter had no say in had started to pile up at the end of the last decade.

Some of these issues were:

- Immigration. (Consensus was that immigration was fantastic, no matter who of from where.)

- Gun laws. (Consensus was that guns are bad and should be banned.)

- Making Swedish an non-obligatory language in schools. (Consensus was that although learning to speak Swedish is useless to 99% of Finns, Swedish-speaking Finns (5%) had to learn to speak Finnish so it would be just fair to make Finnish speaking Finns (95%) to speak Swedish.)

- Climate change. (Consensus was that climate change is soon starting to destroy everything and Finland should be on the forefront of economic suicide to try to stop it.)

- EU. (Consensus was that no matter what, EU is just fantastic.)

- New sewage-law that forced every small cottage in the country not in the sewage network to buy a ~10 000€ mini-sewage treatment plant. The technology was (is) still under development, but the government cleverly liberated the plant-makers from all responsibility about whether the plant actually works, and put all that responsibility on the buyer. This law was a disaster to people on the rural areas. Ironically the implementation of this law was handed to the rural Center Party, since the appropriate minister happened to be from it. This caused the voters to abandon the party and switch to The Finns Party…

…Because The Finns Party had discovered a political gold mine. All they had to do was to oppose each and every one of those unpopular laws/political stances and all the people that disagreed with the Consensus had only one place to go: The Finns Party. This caused the poll numbers to skyrocket after especially those from the Center Party and from the Social Democrats jumped ship. The True Finns was the first non-consensus party in decades and in some ways it would be correct to say that for the first time in a long while we had two-party -system.

Now that they are losing touch on why they were popular (opposing the consensus), they have lost a lot of support.

I can't understand how they've been labelled right-wing or far-right, because they are clearly left-of-center. It is ridiculous to think that a socialist becomes immediately right wing if he starts wondering whether we have enough money to support all these non-educated immigrants that are coming to this country. This would mean that the only politically dividing issue is the stance on immigration.

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Now, Keskusta has a 10 percent lead in the polls because they are very good at politics but what people are forgetting that Kepu pettää aina.

That said, TF will probably be in the next government.