Finnish general elections 2007: results, analysis and forecast

The Finnish general elections were a consensus-seeking beauty contest, where the election results, nevertheless, forecast a revival of a Finnish right-wing. In the Finnish multi-party system three big parties dominate. In 2003-2007 the government was made up of the Centre Party (Keskusta, former Agrarians) and the Social Democrats (SDP). They were challenged by the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) who emerged as the second largest party gaining ten new seats in the 200-seat parliament. With 50 seats they are just behind the 51-seat strong Centre Party, who lost four of its mandates.

The Social Democrats suffered a defeat, losing 8 seats. This was largely due to the uncharismatic leader of the party Eero Heinäluoma, a former trade unionist, and the unsuccessful TV-advertisement campaign by the country’s largest trade union SAK. Negative campaigning against the bourgeois, was intended to make people vote in the elections, but led to public outcry, and ultimately contributed to the election success of the Finnish ‘bourgeois’ party Kokoomus.

Of the small parties, the Left Alliance (Vasemmistoliitto) lost two of its seats but with 17 mandates remain the fourth larges party ahead of the Greens who gained one seat, now totaling 15. The Christian Democrats retained their seven seats, and the Swedish People’s Party (RKP, who aligns politically to the right but also represents the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland) gained one seat. The populist True Finns with 4 percent of the votes more than doubled their mandates, bringing five MPs to the Finnish parliament Eduskunta. The communists and the pensioners’ parties were the leading non-qualifiers with mere 0.7 and 0.6 percent of the vote respectively.

The Finnish elections operate on electoral districts using proportional d’Hondt method (see e.g. Ministry of Justice Election pages http://www.vaalit.fi/38626.htm). Therefore the national percentage of support (i.e. votes counted on the national level) for the parties are distinct from the number of seats. On the national level, Keskusta remained the winner with 23.1 percent of the votes (24.7 in 2003), Kokoomus came second with 22.3 percent (18.5), leaving behind the slightly shrunken SDP 21.4 (24.5). The Left Alliance with 8.8 percent (9.9) was almost caught by the Greens now scoring 8.5 percent (8.0) of the vote nationally. The Christian democrats lost a little bit of their national support 4.9 compared to 2003 (5.3). The Swedish People’s Party gained a seat but lost a fraction of their vote 4.5 (4.6). The success story was the True Finns with 4 percent (1.6) even though they lost their votes in Helsinki as the boxer Tony Halme stepped down from the Finnish parliament.

The results, which are be confirmed on 21 March, indicate a slight but clear ranking-order between the three large parties; the rapprochement in terms of results between the middle-size Left Alliance and Greens; and the establishment of the populist True Finns among the small right-wing parties RKP and Christian Democrats.

The negotiation over the government starts now after the elections. A right-wing government is forecast, but though Kokoomus has claimed a victory it will be the PM candidate of the largest party in the parliament who will be assigned to start the negotiations. Matti Vanhanen, the sitting PM from Keskusta, did fare well in the elections which focused on the personalities rather than policies. His love-life was under public attention: his former girlfriend whom he had found through online dating and subsequently dumped with an SMS has published a book on the relationship, while just before the elections rumors about him and a pretty Green MP were spread by foreign papers and a Kookomus candidate. Vanhanen, however came second with 24.000 votes in the Greater Helsinki region (Uusimaa) electoral district. He was defeated by Sauli Niinistö, a grand old man of the Finnish politics on the right, who became very popular during the presidential election campaign in 2006. Niinistö’s score of over 60.000 personal votes was a record in Finland, and due to the d’Hondt method also drew in a lot of new and young candidates from the Kokoomus list in Uusimaa.

In Finland there are no already set party lists, but the citizens cast their votes on a candidate, where the votes accumulated to the party determine how many of the candidates who gain the largest number of votes get through in the district. Consequently, elections are highly focused on personalities. Each candidate does their own advertisement, while parties also produce common adverts. Sometimes in the personal adverts the party is downplayed to the extent of being completely ignored, as if the choice were not about politics and the party but only about the candidate. The candidate’s picture and voting-number dominate. This gives an image of a beauty contest, and, indeed, in Finland also a face voting machine has been invented. It picks up the right candidate on the basis of one’s own picture, trying to determine whose face looks the most alike with your own.

This depoliticization is in part supported by the media, who runs stories on the personalities of politics, their private life and character. The public gets an idea of what the people in politics are like rather than what policies they run. This is further contributed by the commentators of party and parliamentary politics, who are media researchers and journalists rather than political scientists – as the election night broadcasts quite clearly indicated. It may be that the journalists trust their own crowds, or it may be that the political scientists are reluctant to comment on daily and parliamentary politics. Nevertheless, this method of representing the politics contributes to the fact that politics and the political are kept out of the perceived politics.

During the election campaign and the discussions, the large parties especially did not wish to push forward a clear and specific agenda. In the discussions, almost any proposition was followed by a collective ‘we want that, too’ or a subsequent watering down of the original proposal. In these debates Timo Soini, the leader of the True Finns was an exception, and more generally the small parties had more chances to profile themselves. The large three run on the image of themselves: the Centre Party having as its slogan ‘(it’s) like you’d vote for yourself’, the National Coalition Party run a sleek campaign with a young baby-face party leader Jyrki Katainen and a wise-old-man Niinistö in the scenes and the SDP lost their flair under the uncharismatic Heinäluoma and the SAK advertisement scandal.

Now, a turn towards the right, which was anticipated during the more interesting and innovative presidential election campaign last year, seems to take place – even though policy differences between the large parties were few and value preferences largely undiscussed. One of the reasons for the revival of Kokoomus was the way in which it could target the self-image of the middle class, who feel confident about their prospects, many earn enough money to pay for services in the household (the previous government pushed through tax reduction of upto 1150 euros for household-services). Finnish self-confidence in general can be seen as improved due to international success stories such as the PISA results over the last couple of years. Thereby, the more national approach of Kokoomus and Keskusta can be seen as more attractive to the voters. Many people in their twenties to thirties, even beyond, wanted to identify with ‘upmarket’ image of Kokoomus or the nobody-anybody image of Keskusta.

Nevertheless, setting up a left-right division in Finland would be a radical move. The polity has been consensus-seeking to cover over the wounds of the civil war of 1918, which has affected many generations. It is interesting to see what effect the discourse on ‘bourgeois’ parties and the right-wing, or even ‘bourgeois Finland’ would have. The traces of this divide and the normative urge to get rid of that and also to get rid of or ignore class boundaries and social differentiation are still in the minds of people. After all, in the parliament which starts on 28 March the number of ‘old’, over 60-year-old, MPs has increased and the number of under 30-year-old MPs has decreased.

The revival of the left and right would not have to end up in a polarization, similar to Hungary, where the left and right have turned into empty words that can cover under themselves any policies and where the divide stands to distinguish two elites from each other (one of them, the right, envisions a strong nationally oriented state, and the other, the left, seeks to shrink the state). Demonstrating differences in policies and values would only benefit Finnish politics. The danger, however, is that the political elite in Finland divides into two – the left and the right – without any discussion of the values they might entail, articulate and promote.

For the middle-size parties it could be a good chance. Both the Left Alliance and the Greens have been suffering from profiling trouble and the internal divide between the left and right. The Left Alliance suffers from the traditional party-centred Maoist old guard, which impedes the younger and more liberally left wing voters and party activists to whole-heartedly support the party. The former and once extremely successful leader of the party, Suvi-Anne Siimes, got disillusioned, dramatically left the party and for a more right-wing environment in the pharmaceutical industry in 2006. Since then the drift within the party has been more openly discussed.

Similarly, among the Greens the right and left-wing of the party causes confusion. There are some who were disillusioned about the way in which the Greens did not leave the government in time when the government proposed the fifth nuclear power plant in Finland, but only in 2002, when the parliament accepted it. The co-operation between the Greens and Kokoomus in Helsinki local government that compromised many strongly felt value positions is another object of critique among the politically red-green. Many of the right-wing Greens have already deserted the party for Kokoomus, but the party seems to be still searching its position between the left and right.

A ‘true’ ‘bourgeois’ or right-wing government which would not contain the Greens would, in long term, enable the opposition parties to carry out more left wing politics. A co-operation in the opposition between the left, social democrats and greens would foster values of solidarity, social liberal diversity and multiculturalism and environmentalism, against the revival of the conservative values, ‘free-market’, tax-cutting and rearrangement of the services in ways that mainly benefit the middle classes and business.

On the other hand the rhetoric on the ‘revival of the right’ and the ‘bourgeois Finland’, which I have been reproducing here is also often countered by some of the Keskusta, Kokoomus, Green and True Finn politicians claiming to throw away the old fashioned divide, which does not fit the contemporary conditions of change from an industrial to a service society, where everyone is either an entrepreneur or precariat workforce in short-term temporary contracts. The government of the ‘middle’ that would avoid the headings of ideology and party systems would also be a possible choice in Finland in 2007, which ever combination of the Greens, Christian Democrats, RKP and the True Finns there would be sharing power with Keskusta and Kokoomus. Each option of the Government could reshape the party map and the parties understanding of their values.

What the 2007 elections, nevertheless, clearly demonstrates is that the electoral districts require a reform. The Eastern districts which at their smallest have mere 6 candidates do not suit a multi-party system as that in Finland, where, nevertheless parties in Greater Helsinki region require only 3 percent of the vote to qualify for a post, whereas the veritable threshold in Northern Karelia was 13 percent. In this district the party leader of the Greens Tarja Cronberg failed to get elected without a working electoral alliance. Historically, in the neighbouring Southern Savo district an electoral alliance between the Greens, Left Alliance and the large SDP produced only one candidate for the social democrats while a Green candidate went through. This, however indicates that the votes for the Greens were high in Southern Savo, while, nevertheless as a whole the voting turn out was low (64.5%).

The turn out was in fact low in the whole of the country (67,8%) due to the unimaginative and depoliticised campaign, that was contrary to the previous years popular presidential elections (77.2% on the second round) and to the 2003 parliamentary elections (69,7%).

Emilia Palonen, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Academy of Finland at the University of Jyväskylä.

discourse seminar in helsinki: the finnish elections

The informal discourse theory seminar in Helsinki starts at 6pm on 20 March 2007. The general topic is Finnish general elections 2007, where the main voting day is 18 March.

The themes visited are related to consensus, party identification, ideological and discursive changes, coalitions and political frontiers - but do not hesitate to suggest your own discursive and discourse theoretical (deconstructive, psychoanalytical etc.) readings!

The aim of the seminar is to establish and maintail a network and space for political analysis and theory inspired by the thought of Ernesto Laclau.

The place for this first meeting is the Kappeli cafe (http://www.ravintolaopas.net/kappeli/). The group, which has a basis on a lecture course on Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the Department of Political Science at the University of Helsinki now operates work beyond university. Kappeli happens to be a traditional place where intellectuals met to talk about politics.

‘…the state will wither away’: ‘left-wing’ government in Hungary

After the Hungarians lost their chains

‘…the state will wither away’

The Hungarian Socialists are true to their Marxist roots in one respect: contributing to the running down of the state. In the postcommunist condition, the liberation from the central power, decentralisation has been a popular goal. In government, the Hungarian Socialist party of Ferenc Gyurcsány, with their Liberal junior partner Free Democrats, seeks to minimize state functions and expenses in the difficult economic situation the country has found itself.

Hungary was found having a heavy budget deficit. This emerged slowly after the previous elections held April 2006, and when the Finance Minister and the PM admitted having deliberately lied about it, riots broke out in September and October.

Gyurcsányi, the PM who lied, kept his post and even strengthened his position, as he was elected the party chief end of February 2007. What is happening in Hungary? Where do the left and right lie, and what’s going on with the parties an the state?

Basically, the country has been showing symptoms of deep polarisation, bipolar party system, since 2000. The primary goal of each of the two political elites is to be in power. When in power, the elite rules for itself and its supporters. Strong statehood and democratic politics as a cross-party conversation has lost its point – what is left is the two main political parties.

The dominant line of argument between the polarisation is nationhood. For the Hungarian right, who were in power 1998-2002 with PM Viktor Orbán – still a top politician in the country – the role of the state is to strengthen the power of the nation. When celebrating the so called millennium of Hungarian statehood in 2000, the emphasis was on the national character of the Hungarian nation-state. Not for nothing did professor George Schöpflin, now a Fidesz MEP, write about etatism and nationhood as highlights of postcommunism (1993, 2000).

For the left, the unspoken aim of the reforms is that the state should wither away in order not to function as a platform for the celebration of the nation. In part they seek to follow the neo-liberal economic models. To put it crudely, the final reason for the running down of the state is to privatise some of its functions for the left-elites.

The problematic of the nation manifests itself in anti-Semitism and accusations of such. Recently when abroad the Socialist PM has been accusing the main opposition party of supporting anti-Semitism, which he claims now is as bad as ever before. It is rather well-known for anyone reading key speeches and observing symbols of the Fidesz party that irredentalism and anti-Semitism are present in their rhetoric. One of the reasons is that it is impossible to revive the Interwar period’s heritage without also importing these dominant aspects of it. (After all, Hungary passed the first anti-Jewish law already in 1922.) Nevertheless, does this heritage really need to be recovered?

Riots are to be expected in 15 March 2007, when the prime minister will be giving speeches on the national day. It is a traditional holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution celebrated by all parties, but often monopolised by the right and the mass gatherings of the extreme right.

For the Hungarian right it would be unthinkable to reduce the state. They have been loudly against privatisations (such as the Budapest airport). Also, it is unthinkable for anyone with a traditional ideological map in their head to have the Socialist party selling state property.

This nevertheless, is happening. Not only with firms and functions but also with the real estate of the state. The government will sell all the building it is based in to cover the budget deficit. The aim is to create a new Government Quarters, built ‘without tax-payer’s contribution’ so that all the funds could be targeted to the budget and in brand new environment-friendly and functional rented property next to the western Nyugati square and train station (formerly Marx square) and near the West End city centre.

The site (see picture on NOL) belongs to the city of Budapest – lead since 1990 by a liberal mayor Gábor Demszky, who has been equally a red garment to the right-wing leaders as Ken Livingstone once was for Margaret Thatcher. Here the controversy lies in the Jewish roots of Demszky’s party (while Livingstone has more recently caused some by his anti-Semitic comments). It can therefore be seen as another reinforcement of alliance between the left-wing national government and the capital city

The idea is not only to relocate but also to shrink the state bureaucracy. The model for this Government Quarters was sought, for instance from Washington, as the related article in the Socialist newspaper Népszabadság on 18 August 2006 suggests.

‘Go west, get rid of the state-functions and property, think in short-term and rent in long-term’, the policy position seems to hold. Not only this, it stresses the importance of the party over the state. The crowning of the PM as the head of the Hungarian Socialist party. It highlights the process where the party is taking over the role of the state ‘whithering’ away.

Would it be different from the right? No, on the anti-communist side the party would adopt in a more traditional state socialist manner the control of the strong state and merge these two and the Hungarian nationhood into a single unit.

Postcommunism has its paradoxical side that may be difficult to comprehend, even in our Blairite post-Fordist polities.

Sources:

Népszabadság online (NOL)

Treasury Property Directorate (KVI), press release 8 November 2006, http://www.kvi.gov.hu/index.php?akt_menu=83&hir_reszlet=53

George Schöpflin (1993) Politics in Eastern Europe 1945-1992, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. (2000) Nations, Identity, Power; The New Politics of Europe, London: Hurst.

trestruction bauhaus

the icon of modernism stands again like a temple on the field, as the great modernist gropius had planned it in the 1920s.

or does it?

the trees planted after the WWII around the BAUHAUS building in dessau were cut on 14-15 february 2007. the plan is to create a new park around the building, following the original plans, and to better accommodate a visitor car park. the new minimalistic design for the surroundings of the UNESCO protected building have already been chosen in a competition.

this action is for preserving the original state of the building that in 1926 was constructed on a field - out of the city and urban structures of dessau.

it tries to return its original shape and setting.

at the same time the the ‘icon of modernism’ is being turned into an eternal, timeless building. a temple, as it was once envisioned to become.

the building is stripped off from its own historicity turned into an ageless, contextless icon.

or is it really? can it really be?

links: more photos, bauhaus dessau

posters for bauhaus

below are the presentations for the mid-term projects here at the bauhaus kolleg.

Luxembourg personal project mid-term part one

Sibiu personal project mid-term part two

discourse theory and comparison

Personal contribution on sibiu memorials to group project

CFP: The Construction of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: Discourses on populism and nationalism

cfp_laclau_helsinki.pdf

Here’s a call of papers for a conference I’m organising in September 2007.

(The pdf is also available here on the Department of Political Sciences, University of Helsinki.)

Discourses on populism and nationalism

Call for papers

The Construction of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’:
Discourses on populism and nationalism

University of Helsinki, 7-8 September 2007

A key
theme in politics, which translates to many fields of study, is
identification * or disidentification. ‘Us’ and the sometimes equally
relevant ‘them’ are articulated at various levels from the family circle,
to the neighbourhood, local identifications, sub-cultural groups,
political parties and social movements, and further to the level of
nationhood and beyond. These may overlap or draw from each other in the
process of their articulation. One of the cases in contemporary Europe,
are the overlapping identifications with the EU, nation, region and the
locality. They may also deal with populism, exclusion and minorities.

A useful tool for recognising and understanding the logics operating in
these processes is discourse theory. The key note speaker at the
conference is professor Ernesto Laclau - an author of, most recently, On
Populist Reason (2005), and also Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso: London, 1985, with
Chantal Mouffe), New Reflections on Revolutions of Our Time (1990), and
Emancipation( s) (1996). Laclau’s discourse theory have made major
contributions in the field of politics, but also history, literary
studies and sociology, as well as area studies. This is his first visit
to Finland.

The conference seeks to discover different cases, logics and phenomena in
the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Papers addressing nationhood and
populism are particularly sought for, but other ‘we’ groups may also be
studied, with focus on either empirical or theoretical problems - or a
combination of both.

The aim of the conference is to allow a truly interdisciplinary forum for
the study of these questions. The conference language is English.
Abstracts for presentations (ca. 150 words) should be emailed to the
conference organiser by 15 March 2007.

The conference is organised by Emilia Palonen on behalf of the Academy of
Finland funded research
project Nations and Their Others: The Finns and the Hungarians since
1900, led by Heino Nyyssönen. It is supported by the Aleksanteri
Institute, the Department of Government and the Collegium Helsinki at the
University of Helsinki.

Contact:
Dr. Emilia Palonen,
University of Helsinki
emilia.palonen@ helsinki. fi
emiliapalonen@ yahoo.co. uk
(please use both addresses)
Tel. +358 40 5077198

I just came accross a reproduction of my conference call online: http://gaptoknow.org.ua/uncategorized/discourses-on-populism-and-nationalism.html

A hidden saint in Sibiu

Sibiu 2006. A removed saint.

Until now, much of my academic work has been on street names, statues and memorials, and the, mainly, postcommunist politics of memory mainly in the context of Budapest but also on London. In Sibiu (Hermannstadt in German, Nagyszeben in Hungarian) in Transylvania, Romania, I was fascinated by this statue, which had recently been removed from the main square, Piata Mare. The square had undergone a serious transformation shortly before the beginning of the 2007 European Cultural Capital year. Only sometimes memorials are stored somewhere after the removals.

This happened in Budapest after the WWII and the establishment of the new political order, the statues in the city were changed. Many of the removed memorials were stored in a farm. Their clandestine existence was ended, however, in the postcommunist period, when many of these statues were returned to the city, to cover the empty plinths which had hosted Soviet and socialist heroes.

The hidden saint in the backyard of a courtyard in Sibiu is a reminder of the changed political climate and the establishment of new discursive-ideological order. As a case of relocation rather than destruction it says something about the values of this new order and its readyness to deal with the past, even by hiding it in a near-by courtyard. The relocated saint also demonstrates how when taken out of its previous context and embedded in a new one, the hidden saint loses its previous meanings and reference points and gains new ones.

For instance, surrounded by walls, to the extent of giving an idea of someone imprisioned, the statue loses its aura of a hero overlooking a square gaining its power from its dimensions and monumentality. Reduced to the company of everyday objects, the wash-lines, the memorial becomes domesticates, forgotten.

This of course is the fate of many statues and memorials. Do we really notice them? Is there an encounter? And if we remove them, relocate them, do we realise them better. Do they appear in their absence?

Tony Blair’s speech

Here’s an analysis of Blair’s last speech as the party leader in the Labour Party conference 26 September, 2006. I wrote it for other purposes, but it might be interesting more widely than for my own note books in even in this format so I post it here.

Blair: Responding to the situation 1. As always in party conferences there is a sequence of speeches whereby the one under our analysis is a follow-up and a response to some previous ones. Here specifically:

• the response to Gordon Brown. In the official version the remarks about Gordon. Nevertheless the was on the picture all along.

  John Snow on the day’s Snowmail remarked: ‘Blair’s valedictory speech as leader to the Labour Party conference was a pretty good one but not so good that it in any way detracted from Gordon Brown’s performance yesterday. There have been times when Blair has been almost more than brilliant on the conference floor - today was not one of them, although it had its moments. It seemed to me that he was emotionally charged from the very beginning, he made a funny and yet risky - or is that risqué? - aside at the start of the speech. He said of his wife: “At least I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door”. This, after Cherie Blair reportedly accused Brown of lying in his speech, you could interpret what Blair said as almost substantiating that she had said it, despite her denial. Handling such a charged issue by way of a gag is a demonstration of oratorical mastery and matey finesse - of the sort one wouldn’t expect from Mr Brown.’

• Gordon in his own speech made a point about himself being a servant and the task of politician to be such. Tony acknowledged that he is, which might be seen as support for him. And he even makes a similar point about need to be of service to the people. On the other hand, he leaves the door open.

• On Gordon’s speech. First part of the speech: either the 10 year anniversary speech – or the speech for a divorcing couple. As in case of any good speech and especially in the case of a divorce speech one would expect a catch in the end, something would emerge. A revelation? The Hungarian PM admitted he had lied – but he still wanted the relationship between himself and his party (and later, once the speech was leaked, the people). What did Gordon do? What was the thing emerging? The moment of the “I”. Me Gordon. As in many other long and turbulent relationships what emerged was the independence of the partner. Not always there has to be one overshadowed by another, for this “I” to emerge. In this case there had.

• Compared to this Tony was hardly mentioning Gordon. The moment of the “I” was longer in Tony’s – but this also expected in the sense that this had always been so. On the other hand, Gordon was surprising the crowd, although this was expected of him, by delivering something about his personal values and plans.

• For Gordon Brown the religious values were quite quickly turned into socialist ones, belief held as important. But rather than putting things in God’s hands Gordon keeping the faith in the Party ground.

Blair: Responding to the situation 2. Not only to Gordon Brown, Tony Blair was responding to his critics. He was constructing the “other’s” he needed to reject to claim his own position.

• to the critics – he talks in the end of his speech increasingly about “they” who had been thinking he had changed and related him with the Tories. ‘From the day I was elected until the day I leave, they will always try to separate us. “He’s not Labour.” “He’s a closet Tory.”‘

• The task was to show that New Labour period (also for Gordon) had been a great moment in the history of Britain and in the history of the Labour party.

• The enemy or the ‘other’, the position to contest, for Blair was the past. He was still responding to the situation of Tories had created. He’s responding to the Old Labour. Even now he is reinventing himself and what the party should become. He makes a virtue of change, which many see as a/his vice. It’s ok to be different now compared to ten years ago.

• In some ways Tony Blair seems to be creating a monster that he then runs ahead of. Like running ahead of a high-speed train, he rejects also his own past, his own 1997 New Labour, his 2005 New Labour and turns his own position into the newest of the New Labour. Obviously to the party, who has been supposed to follow him this has been a tough task. However necessary some of them might see the reason for changing policies, the task of constant competition with one’s own past isn’t easy.

  One of the best rhetorical techniques in political speech is that of paradiastole – which means turning vices into virtues and vice versa. Some times whole conceptual frameworks get reversed, but this is also a tool just to legitimate policies. We can say that there are minor instances when this technique is employed and major ones.

• One of the moments, of course, is the normative redescription of the past. This moment was to be about the looking back and praising the Blair project – as Gordon Brown had done in the first part of his speech. It went beyond. Blair was responding to his own critics of whom some claimed he was going against the grain of the Labour tradition, others claimed he was going against his own earlier policies. That’s right, he seems to argue, as Blairism of the past was not about Blairism today. (He also seems to demonstrate what would have happened had he stayed in power, what the policies would have looked like – whereas Gordon Brown makes the rhetorical move of takes it as granted that he would be the leader and sketches the future with he and ‘his team’ which included – according to my newspaper sources – his rivals.) Here past is seen as a vice, not a virtue. Thus, Blairism of 1997 was only virtuous in its context.

• Rather than merely assuming something as a vice that he needs to turn to a virtue, Blair establishes or plays with existing conceptions, and plays out his own position – as their opposite. “They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation’s future.” This was one of the few remarks on the war in Irak – the most contested policies of the Blair government.

• ‘Selective trust schools or city academies’ was another contested policy that Blair sought to legitimate. ‘But if, as at the academy I visited in Lewisham, good GCSE results doubled in a year, and a school once under-subscribed, now five times over-subscribed, how is that a denial of public service values? Surely it is the most vivid affirmation of them.’

• Blair singled out two important figures for politics: the patient and the parent. He talked about the hot topic of the NHS reforms [which include public private partnerships and (semi-)privatisations] – ‘on the NHS in an independent treatment centre, in 3 months, free at the point of use, that is not damaging the NHS; it is fulfilling its purpose.’ Both Blair and Brown acknowledged the NHS as a Labour achievement and a thing that the Britons should be proud of. With the continuous critique of the NHS and the suspicions that the government will simply privatise health care, this is important.

• One of the examples of a critiqued policy were the ID cards and the DNA database. On the latter Blair argued: ‘We were told it was a monstrous breach of liberty. But it is now matching 3,000 offences a month including last year several hundred murders, and thousands of rapes and other violent offences. Difficult reform leading to real progress in the fight against crime.’

• He recognised ‘the fundamental dilemma: how do we reconcile liberty with security in this new world?’ These two things are commonly seen as opposites are now being related. This is one of the main dilemmas of Blair (objects of the critique he’s gained) and a cross-cutting theme in his speech.

• Even claiming that he is not a Tory, he redescribes himself, and describes the socialist values on his side: ‘I’m a progressive. The true believer believes in social justice, in solidarity, in help for those not able to help themselves.’

  Other issues:

• We could also look for the way in which things that appear completely incompatible with each other and also with the traditional Labour values are been related in Blair’s speech.

• We could see the ways in which politics is seen by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, where one of the paradiastolic moments emerges. Is politics about the ‘image’? Spinning and image-building had been seen as backbones of the New Labour project of getting into power – or to put it with Blair ‘of not losing’. Brown emphasises politics as service. Blair argues that next elections should not be about image but about ’strength, judgment, weight and ideas for Britain’s future in an uncertain world’. He argues: ‘The next election won’t be about image unless we let it be.’ By this he may support Brown, or whoever else will follow him, as it is generally seen as difficult task to find someone equally charismatic as himself or the Tory counterpart David Cameron. And why would he want to deny this…

  Responses: what I found interesting was the way in which expectations were created before Blair’s speech. And after the hype everyone was analysing it (even the Finnish national daily I read this morning.). The fascinating point is the way in which the speech then did not meet the expectations in the eyes of the media. It didn’t appear as the classic speech.

  Just an hour before the whole event Blair’s speech from perhaps the 1996(?) party conference was shown on the channel (BBC Parliament) I was watching online. In comparison, Blair was low key. Is it that he really was? Is it that we could recognise the catch words in his speech: “tories no more the party of the family but a party of law and order”, “we are the party of the individual”, “new politics”, “beyond left and right”, “with opportunity must come responsibility” [sic], [on previous government:] “long on rhetoric and short on policies at work”? Whereas with the new one he we could not yet. Or was is that, because he was so focused in reinventing himself as the Blair of 2006, he did not dwell in nostalgia, as I did watching the previous speech? Did we simply want to focus on the nostalgia? Perhaps we really would have needed to hear these catch-words to let him go. In this process, we might have been able to understand why the hell it was that we were all so excited about a political change, a break from the Tory rule and – let’s face it – about Tony Blair. [I remember the feeling in Edinburgh after the landslide, when I was on an Interrail with my friend and saw the Labour double-deckers driving past and declaring the victory. Fantastic! In the same autumn I went to study in the UK. After the short honeymoon came the protests against the tuition fees, then those against the wars in Afghanistan and Irak. Ultimately, my Britain has been the Blairland that I just emigrated from and soon no longer exists.] The last words of Blair’s speech were: ‘You’re the future now. Make the most of it.’ Look, Tony, it’s a bit difficult as you just claimed it for yourself, for the new Blair, the 2006 model. Expectations matter. Irrespective of whether I would have wanted that model, irrespective of whether I know that in this kind of a speech a sensible leader projects also towards the future, I would have wanted to see you through the nostalgia and as the past.

Hungarian riots: the Aftermath of a Crushed Fantasy

 

The Hungarian PM Ferencs Gyurcsány admitted to the Socialist party crowds in May that he had been lying “day and night”. When the news broke out the fantasy of the democratic, economically viable Hungary was broken down. In Hungary, the response was turmoil. Political scandal and riots on the streets. The politicians had let down the people. What came to replace the fantasy of the well-off country was that of revolution.

My point here is to look what was going on. Why did he/they lie? Why did he admit it? What happened when they admitted it? And, finally, what is this “revolution” about anyway?

Even though the international community seem to have been ignorant, the country’s economy has been in a crisis for a while. Already during the summer it had been revealed that the PM and the Minister of Finance had been lying about the real state of the budget deficit, for months prior to the elections.

Yet, the revelation of the state of the Hungarian economy comes as a surprise to the larger community of EU countries, businesses and ‘the Western World’ – only a few would care about the Eastern neighbours’ perceptions on this matter. Perhaps, the actual state of the economy is surprising for me, too, I feel under-trained to take positions as my specialisation are discourses, ideals and experiences.

As all Hungarians, I also know that politicians have not really bothered to do anything about the economic situation. Neither have they really cared about the ordinary people. Election promises are promises, and these two – i.e. ‘we will fix the economy’ and ‘your life will become better over the next four years’ – have been pretty incompatible, especially in the conditions of the dominant neoliberalist discourse abroad and in Hungary.

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Privatisation of Hospitals: A Case to Illustrate the Situation

Let me take the example of privatisation of hospitals, to account for some context. This has been an issue in Hungary especially due to, since and around the referendum in December 2004. The turn-out in the referendum was too low to qualify but the results showed a strong opposition to privatisation. The liberal party SZDSZ supported the cause and the far-left parties and for the sake of mobilisation Fidesz, the main party on the national right, opposed it.

Everyone in Hungary knows that something has to be done about the health care system and hospitals in Hungary. Generally speaking the quality is bad and the system expensive. The nurses and young doctors are badly paid. Also it is expensive for the people using it since it is customary to give gifts (money) to your doctors and hospital nurses. There are cases where a patient has paid 100 000ft extra for a treatment and examination by a high-ranking doctor – a sum equaling a monthly salary of many Hungarians.

In September 2006 Hungarian newspapers were reporting on how things are elsewhere. They revealed that fellow EU citizens pay set fees to use the healthcare services in their countries. Indeed, this might solve some of the funding problem and the problem of corruption. However, since the unregistered, untaxed ‘gifts’ are going straight to the salaries of the doctors, first investment would be the salaries of doctors.

To put it prudely, one of the reasons behind the calls for privatisation is that if things were privatised those with money would not need to go to the very expensive and few private hospital or the ordinary ones, but would have more chances to avoid the ‘horrors’ of the Hungarian hospital. This demonstrates the logic on which many decisions are made by the political elite.

The state cannot afford to run hospitals, yet it would like to receive the tax on the real value of health services (and cut corruption…). Critical studies show how, in total, privatised health system is not any cheaper than a state-run one. Besides, if just the hospitals were privatised, who would buy them?

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Until now, the Socialist-Liberal government has sold the state property when it does not know how to deal with it. The privatisation of the Budapest airport is a recent example. Usually the sales produce little income. This is one of the things that Gyurcsány stressed in his speech in May: even if we sold everything that the state owns, we would not solve our current situation. There has to be large-scale reforms and long-term thinking.

This leads to the question: why did Gyurcsány admit that he had been lying? In short, he needed to legitimate large scale reforms, which would have little connection to the election promises. These promises could not be kept, was the PM’s message to the party crowd after the elections in May. Now as the recording of his speech was leaked in September, the whole country heard this.

Once the speech was leaked, Gyurcsány continued admitting what he had done but stressed that everyone in Hungary had been lying for the past 8-10 years.

Basically, Gyurcsány attempted to make it possible to carry out reforms to the economy. For this he needed to recognise that there is a problem. Instead of insisting that everything is going well, truth about the “fucked-up” state of Hungary had to be told. For this the whole culture of nationalism and deception should be reversed.

**

Why had Gyurcsány been lying? To win elections. Not a very noble cause – but for the party audience that his original speech was actually intended to.

Hungarian politics has been polarised since the late 1990s. This means that there is a strong frontier between the two political camps of the left and right. There is little contestation within each of the camps. The main objective of any political struggle is to defeat the other. In fact, the other camp is vital for the construction of the self-image of the own camp. Rejection of the others – which takes often forms of negative campaigning – offers the sense of unity.

Many of the lies, therefore, have been made to maintain the balance. Any controversies that might harm one’s own camp are undermined or rejected as the fault of the other. When this logic is the guiding principle in politics, there is no room for honesty.

The accusations by Gyurcsány that everyone has been lying were denied by the leader of the main opposition party Fidesz, former PM Viktor Orbán. Besides following the confrontational logic of polarisation Orbán sought to maintain the fantasy of the economically viable and democratic Hungary that had been so important for all the parties’ discourses.

Curiously, just before the general elections in April, Gyurcsány had a crushing victory over Orbán in a crucial TV debate, when he demonstrated how the former PM had lied and still does. Lying became an unpronounced election theme. Now the current PM himself admitted to having lied all along.

**

Everyone in Hungary knows that politicians lie. Even in the last elections many chose to vote for “the robbers against the murderers”. So far no one had admitted it.

Everyone knew that the Hungarian economy was in a bad shape. Now it became official. The country was in ruins.

The figure of ‘fantasy’ in psychoanalytic thought implies that even if everyone knows something to be a mere illusion, they want to believe in it. Fantasy brings cohesion and togetherness. When the bubble is broken, the emperor revealed to be naked and fantasy is dissolved.

The process of breaking down of a fantasy causes a lot of distress and therefore, when Gyurcsány admitted to have lied and argued that so had everyone else, he broke the bubble. He said something that had not been said before, something unsayable in those conditions. The structuring fantasy broke down.

It was replaced by another unifying fantasy: the myth of the revolution.

**

For the Hungarians and their national identity, the myth of the revolution is important. The tradition of the years 1848, 1956 and 1989 is constantly recalled in public speeches and symbols. This year the 50^th anniversary of the 1956 revolution had already started. At the time disillusionment the ideal of the people’s fight against the power-holders was seen as the solution for future action and for the lacking sense of unity.

But who’s “revolution” was this? The hooligans, neo-Nazis, ordinary right-wing people and disillusioned youth on the streets were one of the “revolutionary” sides. The revolutions of 1956 and 1989 had rather been one’s of reforms, “refolutions” as some political scientists call them. Also Gyurcsány called for a new era through reforms.

His rhetoric was “revolutionary” in the sense of shaking the old patterns of thought and speech. In his speech to the party activists, he used rough language and swore. In Hungary the nation and the country have been idealised in the political rhetoric of all parties, especially prior to the elections.

Having won the elections in April 2006, in his May speech Gyurcsány referred to Hungary using the most common swearword: things in this “bloody country” (kurva ország) had to be put on track.

**

Future will show whether Gyurcsány will indeed be the one to take care of the needed reforms and what will happen in the local elections in early October. The opposition parties were already before the crisis leading in the polls.

The political strategy the PM chose was a brave one. On the other hand, his choices were limited. His was the first government to continue after the elections since the new political system was established 1990. Thus, elections had not offered any break in policy. After all, previous changes of government after the elections had caused a mini-revolution changing besides the political elites, also the policies and bureaucrats. This time, the economic situation itself caused a need for deep changes.

In the long-run, however, mere reforms, changes or a “revolution” itself cannot offer the cohesive force or a solution to the economic decay in Hungary.

“Wir fahren nach Stuttgart”

I repost something from my personal blog palemics.wordpress.com

The last week of the Football World Cup is here - and It’s been all quite interesting.

1) supporting England: How can I be an England supporter? I’m not English, not a real Essex girl - thank gods. Nevertheless, I felt that England is closest to my home country - not only in the World Cup, though, but this time definitely of all the countries participating. As many people from England I am a bit weary of that identification - and the identification with a red-and-white football supporters and even more so with the hooligans.

Nevertheless, this was my choice, and the affiliation I saw as the most natural one. I tried to find ways of flagging it. Finding a shirt with the St.Stephen’s Cross on the front and number seven in my back. Beckham - he’s ok, he’s ex-ManU and I’m ex-ManU (now FC United) supporter. But why would I - an unbaptised pagan - start looking like a crusader? The next t-shirt I found was red: it said England on the front and Rooney at the back. If Becks is far from my taste for men how would I look as a Rooney-girl? It would have been a good piece of memorabilia for this World Cup, though. So they went and lost. I was sad, but hey - if a team cannot score, they should perhaps not go forward in a cup…

2)  …which is what happened to the Germans. How sad! Selfishly speaking, it would have been great to be in Berlin with Germany in the final. Nevertheless, my German friends have welcomed all their Italian friends over here - not that the Germans would be supporting Italy in the final, but it feels good. I also invited my old Italian flatmate with whom I unfortunately lost touch.

Last night was quieter than the previous nights after a German victory. During the matches the whole Berlin is empty - the previous time, during the Argentina match, I witnessed it from the air as I needed to board when the extra-time started. Nevertheless, five minutes after the Italy match the street became live again. With celebrating Italians - and Germans trying to hide their disappointment into celebration.

“Shade” was one of the most common words of the German commentator (with a Hungarian name - I always wondered if the miracle/tragedy of Bern in 1954 had any thing to do with his career choices?). Indeed, what a shame. I hope the Germans will be still cheering for their team in the battle over the third match. The slogan “We fahren nach Berlin” turned into a travelling to Stuttgart. Doesn’t sound as fancy, but I hope it catches on and the atmosphere of a great Football Festival remains.