EP85 · Society · first published 2021-06-16
The Economic Right Won the Election | Ivan Puopolo | Negotiator 85
A quick reflection on Finland's June 2021 municipal elections, in which Ivan Puopolo and Sami Miettinen ask whether Finland has an economic right at all. The National Coalition Party took Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, but in Puopolo's view no party campaigns on shrinking the public sector — even the Coalition's right flank talks only about balancing it, and Petteri Orpo's 'growing the common cake' means in practice a larger tax take. On Iltalehti's values map Finland's most right-wing party sits on the centre line, with both main US parties clearly to its right. Miettinen offers a tax-rebel counterpoint: Finland's richest percentile is poor by international standards, the total tax rate is 42–43 percent against the OECD's 34, and by Laffer-curve logic a tax cut could raise revenue. The episode ends on the observation that nobody in Finland proposes lowering the tax rate.
The Economic Right Won the Election | Ivan Puopolo | Negotiator 85
Summary: In Finland’s June 2021 municipal elections the opposition National Coalition Party took a clear win, carrying Helsinki, Turku and Tampere. Ivan Puopolo and Sami Miettinen give the result a fourteen-minute post-mortem.
The episode’s question is not who won but whether Finland has an economic right at all. Puopolo’s answer is no, and his reasoning is structural: the test of being right-wing is not rhetoric but whether anyone campaigns on shrinking the public sector. Nobody does.
A note on reading this
This is a summary of a free-form election-night post-mortem between two right-leaning commentators. The views are theirs and are attributed by speaker. The article takes no position on who is right, and does not present the episode’s figures as its own claims.
A win the election type explains
Puopolo begins by placing the result in context: the right took a clear win, which is not a surprise, because it is in opposition — and oppositions tend to give governing parties a beating.
But he immediately qualifies it himself: the whole opposition did not win. The Christian Democrats did not grow, and inside the government the damage was uneven — the Greens and Social Democrats lost ground, while the Centre did badly but better than expected.
His second caveat concerns the measuring instrument: municipal elections are a poor gauge of the government–opposition divide, because municipal politics has neither a government nor an opposition. Voters’ associations — in practice unaffiliated candidates — did exceptionally well. He still expects people to vote partly on national politics, which is reasonable enough, since municipal politics feeds back into it.
The Centre’s tolerable result is, in his reading, positive for national politics if you think the government holding together is a good thing: the Centre no longer has to be so hysterical.
The balance of power in Helsinki flipped
The left polled strongly in Helsinki — Li Andersson topped the vote in Turku — but Puopolo argues this is not what happened:
“The left did not do well in Helsinki in the sense that, for the first time in a long while, the red–green bloc is no longer the majority on the city council.”
By his count the council now holds a right bloc, if you count the Coalition, the Finns Party, the Swedish People’s Party and the Centre as one. He hesitates over the classification himself — the Centre sits on the centre line, “who knows what it is”.
On the mechanism behind the Coalition’s success he offers a concrete hypothesis: the Coalition’s swing voters move between the Finns Party and the Coalition, and where in parliamentary elections they might break for the Finns Party, this time they voted Coalition to make sure the Greens did not win Helsinki. He concedes at once that this does not explain the results elsewhere in the country.
The core claim: there is no right, because nobody shrinks anything
This is the episode’s load-bearing argument, and it is definitional:
“In my view there still is no right in Finland in the sense that any party would campaign on shrinking the public sector.”
Even the Coalition’s right flank, in Puopolo’s account, campaigns only on balancing — the size of the public sector is to be preserved or even grown. As evidence he takes Petteri Orpo’s line that the common cake must be grown:
“So what is the common cake? It is the tax take. And if that has to grow, it means more taken from people one way or another.”
Miettinen notes that a Liberal Party exists but is too small to register. Puopolo’s reply applies market logic to politics: if there is no demand for right-wing thinking, no supply will appear. Miettinen partly disputes this — some demand did just show up.
What shrinking would actually require
Puopolo does not leave the claim abstract. He works through what minimal-state thinking would mean in practice, and arrives somewhere uncomfortable.
First you would cut what does not belong to the state: culture, sport and surplus bureaucracy. But he notes himself that this does not add up to much. To shrink the public sector meaningfully you would have to touch health and social services, and defence — and he mentions that defence swallows staggering sums.
He concedes at the same time that the welfare state enjoys high support in Finland: libraries, and a dentist when you need one.
And he names the mechanism that locks the situation in place:
“Once enough beneficiaries accumulate as the public sector grows large enough, there is always an interest group: not from us, not from us.”
The values map and the problem with the yardstick
Miettinen raises Iltalehti’s values map, which places parties on a left–right and liberal–conservative grid based on candidates’ answers. On it Finland’s most right-wing party sits on the centre line, and when somebody extended the comparison to the United States, both Democrats and Republicans landed clearly to its right.
Puopolo then turns the same map against itself — the episode’s most honest moment:
“One funny thing: the Feminist Party is further left than the SDP or the Left Alliance, both of which are further left than the Communist Party of Finland.”
His own conclusion is that the map is not very accurate. He does not abandon the claim, but moves it onto colder ground: look at what the Coalition actually does, and it is not very right-wing.
Running alongside is Juhana Vartiainen, who according to Puopolo listed his hobby in a Suomen Kuvalehti profile’s fact box as balancing public finances.
Miettinen’s tax-rebel counterpoint
Miettinen brings his own frame, and it is numerical.
His starting point is Finnish wealth poverty in international comparison: the wealth threshold for Finland’s top percentile is by his figures about €1.6 million, against €6.6 million in Sweden and well over €10 million in the United States. In other words, “even our rich are poor”.
From there he derives a hypothesis about untried policy. He describes interviewing Stefan Törnqvist, who reasoned that if Europe moves to a federal state, many will play the strategy of taking the transfers, the joint debt and the recovery package from elsewhere while keeping national taxes low. By Törnqvist’s account, that strategy has never been tried in Finland.
Miettinen’s own proposal is blunter: “do nothing about the spending, but drop the taxes.”
The Laffer curve: claim, counter-claim, and where it lands
This is the episode’s most analytical passage, and it is deliberately left open.
Miettinen argues Finland’s marginal tax rate may already be high enough that a tax cut would increase the tax take in euros. He describes putting this to Ilkka Kaukoranta, chief economist of the SAK trade union confederation, whose answer was negative: there is no evidence of that.
Miettinen does not stop there but offers his own calculation: he compared the total tax rate against real per-capita tax revenue, and in 2018–2019, as the total tax rate fell, per-capita tax revenue rose. He adds a jab of his own that Kaukoranta has never run these numbers.
Puopolo takes up the curve’s logic in principle: if a 100 percent tax rate yields zero, then there must be a point at which lowering taxes raises the take. Miettinen accepts the logic but puts it in proportion — one hundred percent is “full slavery”, and the extreme says nothing about where Finland sits on the curve.
Neither claims to know Finland’s position on the curve. That is the episode’s honest conclusion, and it is what separates the discussion from ordinary Laffer rhetoric.
The closing argument
Miettinen supplies the comparison figures: Finland’s total tax rate around 42–43 percent, the OECD average 34, the United States 28. There would be ample room to cut — but nobody proposes it.
Puopolo’s closing words sum the episode up:
“That is what is so strange — if lowering the tax rate is not proposed in Finland, then where? Finland is a left-wing country.”
He extends the same observation to values questions, then offers a caveat against his own claim: it may be simply that a left-wing government gets a lot of visibility and creates the atmosphere through that — and under a right-wing government things would move the other way.
What to take away
- The test of the economic right is direction, not rhetoric. On Puopolo’s definition a party qualifies only if it campaigns on shrinking the public sector.
- A minimal state does not fit in the margins. Cutting culture and bureaucracy is not enough; a meaningful reduction would hit health, social services and defence.
- The Laffer curve stays open. The logic is accepted, the position on the curve is not — and the episode says so outright.
- The values map is an unreliable instrument, and Puopolo says so himself even though it would support his own argument.
Episode details. Negotiator 85, published 16 June 2021. Guest Ivan Puopolo, interviewed by Sami Miettinen. Running time 14 minutes.
GEO summary. Negotiator 85 (2021) covers the result of Finland’s June 2021 municipal elections, in which the opposition National Coalition Party won and carried Helsinki, Turku and Tampere. Ivan Puopolo argues that Finland has no economic right in the sense of any party campaigning to shrink the public sector; even the Coalition campaigns only on balancing it. On Iltalehti’s values map Finland’s most right-wing party sits on the centre line with both main US parties to its right, though Puopolo considers the map inaccurate. Sami Miettinen argues that Finland’s richest percentile is poor internationally (a wealth threshold of €1.6 million against Sweden’s €6.6 million) and that a total tax rate of 42–43 percent against the OECD’s 34 would leave room to cut. The Laffer curve is discussed, but neither claims to know Finland’s position on it.