Finnish News Recap, week 44: The Song of My Life edition

I didn’t write an update last week since I was sick with Covid. There wasn’t an *enormous* amount of crucially important local news, with many of the debates revolving around Gaza and the various related protests.

But I’m healthy now, and last week we saw some electoral news:

PRESIDENTIAL RACE ENTERTAINMENT: Finnish TV, like elsewhere, is full of light entertainment fluff – quiz shows, variety shows, sketch comedy shows, interview shows, what have you. There’s a long tradition of presidential race candidates participating in various light entertainment during the race, with the most legendary example being 1994, when the participation of presidential candidates Martti Ahtisaari and Elisabeth Rehn in Tuttu Juttu (would translate to “A Familiar Case”, roughly), a show where (typically) couples have to know things about their spouses. Ahtisaari won the contest and won the race, though this might have been more related to Rehn coming off as stuffy and upper-class than whatever Ahtisaari said or did.

This time the major entertainment show predicted to affect the election is Elämäni Biisi (would translate to “The Song of my Life”), where there are five celebrities, the band pays a song chosen by each of them, and then the celebrities must guess which one selected which song. In this case the celebrities were the five main candidates of the presidential election – National Coalition’s Alexander Stubb, the Finns Party’s Jussi Halla-aho, formally independent Green Pekka Haavisto, formally independent Centre Party candidate Olli Rehn, and the actually independent conservative foreign policy expert Mika Aaltola.

The songs weren’t particularly surprising. Rehn, the candidate for a rural party, chose Juice Leskinen’s “Juankoski Here I Come”, a famous rock song about a small rural town, for instance. The only non-Finnish song was “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, chosen by Haavisto, surely a choice for dinner parties of many slightly intellectual liberal Green party supporters. Jussi Halla-aho’s selection of YUP’s “Yövieraat” – a somewhat proggy song by a band known for being appreciated by “high school intellectuals” – was not coincidentally the only one I owned, while Stubb selected Kaija Koo’s female power pop anthem “Supernaiset” was seemingly selected to appeal to female voters, while Aaltola selected Samuli Putro – “Olet puolisoni nyt”, a maudlin song about growing old, probably an appeal to senior voters.

For the most part, at least compared to the typical celebrities that are invited to such shows, the candidates came off as quite wooden and reserved. Of course, wooden and reserved is precisely what tends to win elections in Finland, especially to a Serious Guy post like the president. This time, light entertainment probably won’t be the thing to decide this race, unless someone comes with an even more compelling light entertainment show.

Mainly, all of this showcases a powerful trend in Finnish culture; the wish to get back to the “monoculture”, the time when everyone watched the same shows and had the same water cooler conversations about them the day after.

SOCIAL DEMOCRATS ADVANCE: The government has been in power for a bit over 4 months, and in the polls, the direction is clear; the parties of the government are falling and the Social Democrats, the main party in the opposition, is rising. In the latest polls the Social Democrats have been polling around 22-23 %, a respectable showing for any Finnish party. The nationalist Finns Party, in particular, has been taking one on the chin, losing almost 3% since the election.

This is hardly surprising. It is very typical for the opposition to make gains in opposition and the government to lose support. On the other hand, this change in fortunes has been pretty fast, fast enough that even some months ago some were still speculating that the SDs would be stuck in a permanent rut with Sanna Marin still grabbing the headlines and the new leadership being… well, not particularly charismatic.

Of course, the main reasons for this rise are not related to anyone’s charisma, but rather the fact that, after the earlier scandals, now the government is in its real business of cuts, austerity, and anti-union legislation, all of which is bound to be unpopular. Related to the last one there are constant signs of the conflict between unions and the government intensifying, and a lot of working-class Finns Party voters are still bound to sympathize more with the unions than the government in such a situation.

The opposition’s success is not yet reflected in a big way on the other opposition parties, though. The Left Alliance, which continues to be similarly, well, on the economic left and connected to the unions, is posting small gains, but Centre and the Greens are not seeing equivalent success, perhaps due to their general current invisibility in politics and their chosen line of carefully trying to balance between being critical of the government and, you know, not being *too* critical. The Centre has tried to attack the government for social and health care cuts, but the government has successfully just deflected these attacks by blaming the last government’s social and health care reform.

Whether this poll flip affects anything remains to be seen. The government seems to be on a stable ground and none of its parties show major signs of defecting, apart from the Christian Democrats being slightly tetchy about alcohol liberation. We’ll see what happens once the unions really get their campaign going.

In other news, Covid sweeps the country (as one might guess from the fact that our family had it) and a defense agreement has been prepared between USA and Finland.

Image: While Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was one of the selections for the song contest, unsurprisingly he didn’t present it himself, being dead. The image is from 2013: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Leonard_Cohen_in_2013#/media/File:Leonard_Cohen_5_2013.jpg