On Friday just over a week ago, Finland's Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade Alexander Stubb (Nat. Coalition Party) issued an interesting statement in Brussels.

He told an STT-Lehtikuva correspondent that the result of the first round of the Finnish presidential elections had been received very favourably in Brussels. After all, no less than 65 per cent of the votes went to pro-EU candidates.

The result had been considered “a resounding ‘yes’ to internationality, the European Union, and liberalism”.

Brussels cannot be blamed for this kind of convenient interpretation, but from the Finnish perspective the situation is slightly more nuanced than that.

What the first round result says is that the Finns are now even more suspicious of the European Union and the common currency than before.

The citizens have already given the country’s political parties two warnings.

The first one came in April of last year, when the Finns Party gained 34 new seats in the parliamentary election, in so doing establishing itself as the third largest party in the country.

The body who suffered most from this turn of events was the previous main government party, the Centre Party, which lost a third of its seats in Parliament and went into opposition with 35 MPs to the Finns Party's 39. .

The second warning came in the first round of the presidential elections.

It was at least equally significant as the Finns Party surprise of last year, for now the entire foundation of Finnish EU policy was shaken.

Until these elections the National Coalition Party, the Social Democrats, and the Centre Party have always more or less agreed on the country’s EU policy issues.

This time around, however, the candidates of these three parties very much had their own diverging visions when it came to the Union.

These three parties’ shared line on EU matters was formed in the early 1990s, when Finland had to decide quickly whether to apply for accession to the Union or not.

Eventually, the then three largest parties agreed that it would pay dividends to seek EU membership.

The joint EU policy line of the National Coalition Party, the SDP, and the Centre Party stood the crucial test, which came in the form of a referendum organised in the autumn of 1994.

The National Coalition Party and the SDP stood uniformly behind Finland’s joining in the EU, but the Centre Party was divided into the supporters and the opponents of membership.

The consensus between the three big players finally came to an end in the spring of 1998, when Parliament decided in favour of joining the monetary union.

The main parties of Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen’s (SDP) government, the SDP and the National Coalition, pushed through the decision to join the euro with the help of the Swedish People’s Party, the Green League, and the Left Alliance.

The opposition Centre Party was against the common currency.

Since the euro decision, however, the three large parties have been more or less of one mind when it comes to Finland’s Europe policy dealings.

There has been some arm-wrestling over the details, but consensus over the main policy lines has survived.

The same consensus is evident even in the Europe debate within the parties. In fact, for years such debate hardly existed. Within the ranks of the SDP and the National Coalition Party, EU-critical opinions were conspicuously absent.

Even in the Centre Party the situation was peaceful for a long time, as the party’s most significant nonconformist, Paavo Väyrynen, was put to one side for a decade as a MEP in Strasbourg.

In the presidential elections, however, the Centre Party candidacy fell into Väyrynen’s lap almost by accident after the European Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn and the pro-EU party chairwoman Mari Kiviniemi had decided against running for the office.

Väyrynen correctly sensed the euro-critical atmosphere and managed to make good use of it.

He drew attention to the history of the euro decision and managed, for the first time, to challenge directly the National Coalition Party’s Sauli Niinistö and the SDP’s Paavo Lipponen, the main architects of Finland’s EU policy line.

And what happened in the election? Väyrynen defeated Lipponen by a crushing margin: he received 17 per cent of the votes against a mere 7 per cent for Lipponen.

The result was astonishing given the fact that Lipponen has been the most significant figure behind Finnish EU policy, a man of almost symbolic stature.

Väyrynen, in turn, has been the most resilient and most strident critic of the EU policies advocated by Lipponen.

Still, as we know now, Väyrynen, too, failed to make it into the second round of the election.

He was beaten narrowly into the invidious third place by the Green League’s Pekka Haavisto.

But let us re-examine Alexander Stubb’s interpretation of the election’s first-round result.

Did 65 per cent of the voters really cast their vote for a pro-EU candidate?

Stubb undoubtedly reckoned that all the 37 per cent of the votes given to Niinistö in the first round were also votes given to the European Union and the common currency.

But what exactly is the present-day Niinistö’s relationship with the EU?

He has not turned against the EU or the euro, but he can certainly be considered a eurosceptic in his own fashion. His stand with regard to funding the euro-crisis countries is clearly more reserved than that of his party.

It pays to observe which of the heavyweight politicians have in recent days expressed their backing for Niinistö in the runoff, and on the other hand, which ones have voiced criticism against him.

The most ruthless EU-critics, the Finns Party chairman Timo Soini and the veteran Esko Seppänen of the Left Alliance, suddenly announced their support for Niinistö.

In Lipponen’s opinion, Niinistö is no longer the Niinistö with whom he guided Finland into the euro. Therefore Lipponen gave his vote to Haavisto.


Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 5.2.2012


Note: As will be obvious from the above, the article was written before the outcome of the second round of the presidential election became clear. Equally, at the time of writing it was not known - it was only announced on Tuesday - that Paavo Väyrynen will be making a bid for the chairmanship of the Centre Party this summer. Considering the support he enjoyed in the presidential contest (and the obvious reluctance of his supporters to get behind either of the two finalists), it would be unwise to rule out a return to the spotlight for the old Centre Party warhorse and eurosceptic, who led the party from 1980 to 1990.
HS.fi

Finally something bearing a resemblance to political analysis from HS. This counter-Jytky talk has been rather annoying, when its not really based on anything else than wishful thinking.