Jacob Christensen

This, I am told, is not a parody but the real thing. Why on Earth support for Paavo Lipponen is languishing at below 10 percent in opinion polls beats me.

Well, not really.

I’ve had this saved as a draft for some weeks now. The discussion ends somewhat abruptly but maybe I will get back to the issue at some point.

Just to continue a line of thought from my previous note: The question about populist parties presenting themselves as “the true Social Democrats”.

The issue may be more relevant in Denmark and Sweden where support for the Social Democrats has taken a hit while the Danish People’s Party and to a lesser extent the Sweden Democrats have gained. Commentators have pointed out that SweDem have played the “real Social Democrats” card by trying to gain ownership of the “Folkhem” concept. As it is, “Folkhem” has a complicated history (it is in many ways a word which lends itself to discourse analysis) being first a Conservative and later a Social Democratic slogan. “Folkhem” also points to the development where Social Democracy changed from being an internationalist to an essentially nationally oriented political movement with the creation of the welfare states in the Scandinavian countries from the 1930s onward as the best-know effect.

Welfare state researchers will note that the national welfare state model probably reached its peak around 1980 (the period used by Gösta Esping-Andersen in his seminal book “Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism”) but that internationalisation and Europeanisation since then has put the national models of welfare under pressure. “Multiculturalism” and “Structural change” do not carry the same emotional weight as “Folkhem”: They are, at best, technocratic terms.

However, we should be careful in focussing too much on the word “Folkhem” as it is a uniquely Swedish term. Danish has no equivalent – “welfare state” is the closest – and this points to the risk of generalising Swedish experiences. As it is, the “welfare state” only really emerged as a political term during the 1960s in Denmark and it was fiercely debated in the 1960s and 1970s. To use discourse analysis-speak, the hegemony of the “welfare state” was less obvious than the hegemony of the “folkhem”.

I spent last week in Vaasa (or Vasa, in Swedish; the town is officially bilingual) participating in a workshop on populist parties. The work was quite intensive with five official sessions and no less than two dinners and here are some of my thoughts after the discussions:

1. Dealing with “the populist parties” in the Nordic countries as a group is problematic for a number of reasons, most notably because of the lack of formal links between the Danish People’s Party (DF), the Sweden Democrats (SD), Fremskrittspartiet (FrP) and Perussuomalaiset (PS) – DF and SD have shown an interest in creating some kind of ties, though – but also because FrP in particular occupy a different position in the political space compared to DF, SD and PS. FrP in many ways look more like a conservative party with more liberal positions on economy while DF, SD and PS all combine an economically centrist position with an authoritarian position on social issues (immigration and crime as the most notable issues).

2. Several of us implicitly or explicitly addressed questions related to the institutionalisation of populist parties in the Nordic party systems. Even if SD and – to some degree PS – are newcomers, all parties were established in the 1970s (FrP) or 1990s (DF, SD, PS) and while it is still difficult to predict the future strength of PS and SD, we should expect them to stay in the national party systems for some time. We should also note that the parties have led deliberate strategies to stabilise the party organisations on the membership and parliamentary level (A colleague noted that DF’s organisational practices in many ways resembled those of communist parties with a very strong and centralised leadership).

3. Two concepts often associated with populism were spectacular absent from the discussions: Charisma and distrust. There are many good reasons why charisma has fallen out of favour in academic discussions – the concept is hard to operationalise and the institutionalisation processes I described above make references to the party leaders’ charisma less relevant.

I am less certain about distrust. If we look at electoral research, populist party voters usually stand out with low levels of political and social trust compared with other voters. The phenomenon of distrust is not uncomplicated – a Danish research project from the 1990s argued that conflicts between elite and majority positions on the one hand and minority positions on specific issues on the other may generate distrust. Immigration and European policy were cited as the most likely sources of political distrust back then. That distrust disappeared from view has to do with the perspective changing from (voter) demand to (party) supply but this is probably where you write: “More research is needed”.

4. Marie Demker has argued that populist parties are better understood as nationalist parties. The argument is interesting as it sees nationalism as the ideological basis which sets these parties apart from other parties in the Nordic party systems. The argument would also fit with the parties’ position on the libertarian-authoritarian scale. Here populism could be seen as a means used by nationalist parties (and other parties – think of Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s famous New Year’s Speech from 2002) to mobilise voters.

If I should argue against Demker’s thesis I would first of all acknowledge that the present-day DF and SD (and in all likelihood PS) unquestionably qualify as nationalist. If we look at the Danish political history, nationalist agrarianism has manifested itself at certain points during the 20th century (The Free People’s Party, later the Peasants’ Party 1934-1945 and the Independents 1960-1966) but so has an outspoken anti-state populism (The Justice Party 1926-1960, 1973-1975, 1977-1981) and I would question if the Progress Party of the 1970s could reasonably be seen as a nationalist party. Again, more research would be necessary here. We should also consider if the peasant populism that we know from the 1930s and 1970s can be meaningfully compared with the working-class populism of the 1990s (in the case of Denmark: 1970s) onward.

One way of reconciling the “liberal” populism of the 1970s and the “nationalist” populism of the 1990s could be to focus on the European dimension. We know that the EC and later EU has been a continued source of problems for the Social Democratic parties in the Nordic countries with the parties being split between internationalism and welfare-state nationalism.

5. One final round of discussions, linked with #4, had to do with populist parties presenting themselves as “the true Social Democrats”. Both SD and DF have used this line of argument with the 1950s as some kind of imagined Social Democratic ideal (something which most people who were adults or adolescents during that decade would probably question) with the post 1968-Social Democracy presented as traitors to the national Social Democratic idea. This calls for some further arguments which I will leave for later.

While the votes are still being counted, the prognosis is fairly stable and the result is quite a stunner: The True Finns Party stand to win 19,1 percent of the vote, making it the second-largest party in terms of votes and the third-largest in terms of seats in the Eduskunta. The Centre Party was the big loser going from 23,1 to 15,8 percent of the vote. Centre Party leader and prime minister Mari Kiviniemi has hinted that the CP could go into opposition while Social Democratic leader Jutta Urpilainen apparently has stated that the True Finns should be taken into account in the coming negotiations over a new government.

In policy terms, a government including the True Finns (PS) would be more Euro-skeptic than the Finnish governments of the 1990s and 2000s. The next question is how the next Finnish government will be constituted: If the SDP wants to tap into the anti-establishment sentiment with PS, the two parties still lack 20 seats to win a majority. Obviously, you could add the Conservatives to the mix – this is Finland, after all, and oversized coalitions are frequent – but having a coalition of two establishment and one populist party sounds a bit uneasy. Still, Wolfgang Schüssel performed a similar act in Austria between 2000 and 2007, and the True Finns’ predecessor party, the Finnish Rural Party, participated in the government between 1983 and 1991. The Swedish People’s Party has been included in every government since the early 1970s but linking PS’s strident Fenno-Finnish brand of nationalism with the minority interests of the Fenno-Swedes will not be easy. At the same time, the SFP may well prefer being inside and able to block the worst of the PS’s anti-Swedish initiatives.

Interesting times indeed.

Update 2001-04-18: (In Swedish) Professor Göran Djupsund considers the problems facing the Conservative leader Jyrki Katainen who will probably be the next Finnish prime minister (he would be only the second Conservative to hold that position since 1946), while (in Norwegian) Anders Ravik Juspkås discusses the forces behind the True Finns as well as the prospects of the coalition negotiations.

Finland is rarely covered here which may be a bit odd given that the Finnish political system in general and party system in particular tended to diverge from those of the other Nordic countries. Finland, obviously, is a semi-presidential system even if it during the last two decades has moved towards a situation where the president just like the Scandinavian monarchs is mostly a figurehead while real political power is concentrated in the hands of parliament and government. The days of Paasikivi, Kekkonen and Koivisto are long gone. But then again, the Soviet Union also ceased to be a long time ago making the need to balance between the West and the East less urgent.

Whereas the Social Democrats emerged as the dominant party in the Scandinavian countries from the 1920s onward, Finland always had a more fragmented party system with the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and the Conservatives competing for the top spot and the Social Democrats facing fierce competition from the Communist Party (under different names). As the political scientist Giovanni Sartori pointed out, the Finnish party system of the post-war era reminded more of those of Italy, the French fourth republic and Weimar Germany. Unlike those, however, Finnish democracy and the Finnish constitution proved to be remarkably stable.

In terms of government formation, Finland also deviated from the Nordic norm, with a bewildering array of coalitions. The past ten years have seen the Centre Party, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives playing a game of ever-changing ministerial chairs and nobody in Finland are surprised over finding the Green Party in the same government as the Conservatives. Here, Finland looks more like the Netherlands with its revolving coalitions.

Maybe the consensual style in Finnish politics is one reason why turn-out is usually lower than in the rest of the Nordic countries (in particular Denmark and Sweden): After all, there is a two-thirds chance that any of the three big parties will be in government after the election. But consensus can also lead to estrangement and be the breeding-ground of anti-establishment movements. The Finnish Rural Party (Landsbygdspartiet) was a parallel to the Danish and Norwegian Progress Parties during the 1970s and 1980s and in true Finnish style even made it into government.

Following the decline and eventual dissolution of the FRP, a new party called the True Finns (Sannfinnländerna) emerged in the mid-1990s but despite managing to enter parliament, the party only managed to play a marginal role until the begin of the 2011 electoral campaign and Finland may be in for the same kind of upheaval which has hit Dutch politics during the last decade: Polls show PS (short for Perussuomalaiset) at around 15% with the Social Democrats and the Centre Party struggling to maintain support even if the two parties are by no means threatened with the kind of electoral melt-down suffered by the Dutch Social Democrats in 2001 or the CDA in 2010 or for that matter the Danish and Swedish Social Democrats during the 2000s.

There are several reasons for the rise in PS support. Even if PS promotes anti-immigrant policies, this is probably less important (given the low number of immigrants in Finland) than a general unease about economic and social developments in peripheral parts of the country as well as the party’s ability to tap into the anti-EU sentiment which has otherwise been kept dormant by the major parties. The PS also mobilised the centre/periphery cleavage by attacking the position of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. Finally, a number of scandals – including one which forced prime minister Matti Vanhanen to resign in favour of Mari Kiviniemi during the parliamentary term – would also have helped in undermining confidence in the political elite.

Sunday’s parliamentary election will be exciting but one outcome is already certain: The next Finnish government will be a coalition.

I must admit that, despite having lived in UmeÃ¥ with Va(a)sa just across the Bay of Botnia, Finnish politics is not my specialist area. Still, in political terms Finland is not quite what Finland used to be, which this weekend’s selection of Mari Kiviniemi as chairman of the Finnish Centre Party is another indication of. Just to put the prejudices in place – Finnish political culture is generally seen as rural and – for want of a better English word – gubbig. Imagine old-boys’ network with quite an element of laddism thrown in for good measure and you’re there.

As it is, Kiviniemi is not the first female party leader in Finland, nor even the first female leader of the Centre Party and prime minister: That honour goes to Anneli Jäättenmäki who served as party leader between 2002-2003 and as prime minister for a few months in 2003 before being forced to retire in a scandal relating to Finland’s position in the process leading up to the second Iraq War. Jäättenmäki was later cleared of any legal wrongdoing so the question is if she had been exposing her inexperience at the international level or if (male?) forces within her own party were conspiring against her. In any event Matti Vanhanen took over as party leader and prime minister and continued in those functions until he was brought down over a scandal relating to covert campaign contributions.¹

The 41-year old Kiviniemi faced Mauri Pekkarinen, a candidate which fitted better with the image of a typical Finnish politician from the Centre Party: Male, old, rural. Even Paavo Väyrynen, unsuccessfully, attempted a comeback. Kiviniemi is far from unexperienced, though: She has been an MP for 15 years, minister for trade and development and later minister for local government. The interesting point is that in 2007 Kiviniemi changed constituency so that she now represents Helsinki instead of Vaasa in the Finnish parliament. Considering that the Centre Party very much has been a party of the Finnish periphery, the selection of Kiviniemi may also point to a change in political strategies.

The local government portfolio may hold a nasty problem in store for Kiviniemi as she takes over as prime minister in a week’s time: If I understand Finnish (Swedish-language) media correctly, she is involved in a battle over Karleby/Kokkola’s administrative position – which again has something to do with the role of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. It’s not quite BHV but it is potentially politically troublesome.² She will also be facing a conflict over the teaching of Swedish in Finnish schools.

Finland will be holding elections next year, so who will Kiviniemi’s opponents be? Well, the other main contenders for the prime minister’s office will be the National Coalition Party’s Jyrki Katainen (born in 1971) and Social Democrat leader Jutta Urpilainen (born in 1975). Just as in the Netherlands, government formation is a bit of a three-party affair with the Centre, the National Coalition and Social Democrats in varying constellations with one or more of the smaller parties joining, so there is a 2/3 probability of the next election yielding a female prime minister. The only thing which is 100% certain is that the Swedish People’s Party will be in the government after the 2011 elections.

If we look at the male/female set-up in the run-up to 2011, the Centre Party, the Social Democrats, the Green League and the Christian Democrats have women as leaders while the National Coalition, the Left Alliance, the Swedish People’s Party and the True Finns have male leaders. The face of Finnish politics is indeed slowly changing.

In the other Nordic countries, female party leaders are far from unknown these days. In Norway, all parties represented in Stortinget either have or have had a woman as leader³, in Sweden only the Moderates and Christian Democrats have not had a female leader (even if the Liberals’ Maria Leissner did not stay in office for very long for both political and personal reasons)⁴, and in Denmark five out of eight parties in parliament are at present led by women.⁵ Iceland has a female Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, who is also the leader of the Social Democratic Alliance.

Oh and by the way: Kiviniemi has prepared for her new status – the fringe is gone and replaced by a more serious hairstyle.

Just in case you have missed it: (Tarja) Halonen is Finland’s (female) president since 2000.

1. The first female party leader in Finland was Heidi Hautala of the Green League [↩]
2. “Kiviniemi giggles at the Constitutional Council’s recommendation”. Charming, no? [↩]
3. The Christian People’s Party still has not had a female parliamentary leader [↩]
4. I here count the Green Party’s dual male-female leadership as a case with female leaders. At present no-one would question Maria Wetterstrand’s role as the Greens’ most profiled politician [↩]
5. Here I count the Red-Green Alliance’s Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen as the party’s political leader even if the party formally has a collective leadership. [↩]

A noted in an earlier post, Danish media have been buzzing with rumours about prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s future since last summer. In case you wonder, the media consensus is that Fogh wants to leave his post in favour of a position at the European Union, preferably as the first president of the European Council under the Lisbon Treaty.

I have nothing to add to all of this speculating but as a political scientist, I am of cause curious about how prime ministers get out of office and what they do afterwards.

If we look at Denmark post-1901 when parliamentary rule was introduced, the sad truth is that only two PMs have left office voluntarily: M.P. Friis in 1920 and Jens Otto Krag in 1972.¹ All other PMs have either died in office, lost elections or votes of no confidence or resigned in the face of parliamentary defeat. As a rule, Danish PMs like annoying relatives tend to overstay their visits.

The Swedish record is more mixed: Tage Erlander and Ingvar Carlsson resigned voluntarily. Olof Palme, on the other hand, was murdered, while Thorbjörn Fälldin, Carl Bildt and Göran Persson were voted out of office. It is not uncommon for Norwegian prime ministers to resign voluntarily and hand over responsibilities to a chosen successor: Tryggve Bratteli, Odvar Nordli and Gro Harlem Brundtland (1996) did so.

But what to PMs do after resigning? To give a perspective on Fogh’s possible future I looked at the biographies of the prime ministers of the Nordic countries since 1980 – my research is not comprehensive: To do a proper study, you will need to check the Blue Books published in the respective countries.

Since 1980, Finland has had seven prime ministers. Mauno Koivisto went on to become president, while Kalevi Sorsa and Paavo Lipponen stayed in national politics for some time. Harri Holkeri went into UN service at a secondary level, while Esko Aho after a sabbatical took up a post at the SITRA foundation.

Norway has also had seven PMs. Odvar Nordli and Kåre Willoch after short interludes became county governors while Jan P. Syse stayed in parliament. Dethroned Labour PM Thorbjørn Jagland also stayed in parliament while taking up a post in the Socialist International while Kjell Magne Bondevik is the leader of the Oslo Centre for Peace of Human Rights. Finally, Gro Harlem Brundtland went on to be director of the WHO.

In Sweden, Thorbjörn Fälldin went back to his farm – supplemented with boardroom-work in state-owned companies – while Ingvar Carlsson more or less vanished into thin air. Carl Bildt made a dual career as EU and later UN representative in the Balkans as well as going into business and doing consultancy work. Finally, Göran Persson has become a professional lobbyist.

Anker Jørgensen soldiered on as chairman of the Social Democrats before finally resigning from that position in 1987, while Poul Schlüter and Poul Nyrup Rasmussen were elevated to the European Parliament. Nyrup Rasmussen actually was deselected as chairman of the Social Democrats, but came back to make a second career as chairman of the Party of European Socialists.

So, where can we find a parallel? The best match to a President Fogh would probably be Gro Harlem Brundtland and I’m sure some readers will find this truly and utterly hilarious.

1. Friis is a special case as he was appointed as caretaker PM during the 1920 Easter crisis [↩]

After the shenanigans of Jeppe Kofod (and especially the completely chaotic handling of the case by the Social Democrats) and Ilka Kanerva’s raunchy text messages, the Irish come to our rescue and brings us a good old-fashioned money-based scandal. And the resignation of the PM.

Alfa males are a fascinating breed.

Today’s news that Finnish nurses will be getting a substantial pay-rise during the coming years are potentially interesting in the other Nordic countries.

In Sweden, trade unions have launched – unsuccessful – campaigns for public-sector workers and in Denmark Social Democrats, Socialists and the Danish People’s Party have competed for the public sector vote before and during the election campaign. The Finnish example could make a labour market conflict in Denmark next spring more likely.

We interrupt the campaign reporting to turn attention somewhat closer to, if not home then our present post of observation: The relationship between Finns and Swedes which is the subject of a report with the bizarre title Different Ways of Encountering a Big Elephant written by Thorleif Pettersson and Sakari Nurmela published a couple of days ago. (Full publication as a pdf; Summary as pdf)

The fun fact of the day is that the average Swede doesn’t know much about Finland but would love to have Finnish friends.

The average Finn on the other hand knows a lot about Sweden and is not particularly interested in having Swedish friends.

Now, how can we possibly explain this…?

PS: The title of the post refers to the peculiar Swedish way of writing “X loves Y” – “X+Y=True”. In Sweden the phenomenon otherwise known as “love” has been replaced with the pragmatic exchange of various kinds of domestic services.