Election Standards

The second round of the Finnish presidential election was held over a week ago, and I’m only now posting something about it (I’ve been tied up with other projects and chores).  Despite a buildup that included a lot of news coverage, one sedate debate after another, and a fair amount of political advertizing, the whole race seemed to be over in the blink of an eye.  Which it kind of was.  It started in earnest only in December, meaning it lasted all of two months, three tops. 

That’s nothing compared to the US election, which after almost a year into the Republican nomination process, is just now building up a good head of steam, with another seven months of grandstanding, self-serving rhetoric, and over-inflated egos to go.

President-elect Sauli Niinistö
Photo by Soppakanuuna

Finns don’t much go in for American-style glitter and flash, especially in politics, so voters here were spared the Hollywood game-show veneer that campaigning has taken on in the US.  Also, there was none of the negative advertizing that I’ve heard so much about bombarding American TV viewers this campaign season.  And no demagogy – just imagine!  (Well, I can’t say for sure whether there might have been some demagogy on the part of the True Finn’s candidate Timo Soini’s, but I feel sure it never reached US standards.) 

Another amazing feature of Finnish elections is how fast the votes are counted, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising in a country of just over 4.4 million voters.  Still, considering that in America you often hear the election results only the morning after (or in a certain famous case back in 2000, a full month later), it’s amazing how fast it all gets done here. 

Forty-five minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m. on Election Day two Sundays ago the outcome was clear.  The entire tally had been completed in a little over two hours, and well before bedtime the official results were announced, both candidates interviewed on TV, and the whole thing wrapped up.  And keep in mind, these are paper ballots they’re counting.  By hand.  Nothing electronic.

Still, perhaps the most glaring difference between elections here and in the US is the money.  The Helsingin Sanomat reported that Sauli Niinistö’s campaign spent something like 1.2 million euros ($1.6 million) to win the contest.  That’s considerably more than the 710,000 euros that Pekka Haavisto had at his disposal, even after an almost 3-fold boost in donations in the last two weeks of the race, including 80,000 euros raked in by a one-time comeback concert put on by the hugely popular band “Ultra Bra”. 

Pekka Haavisto, Green Party candidate
Photo by Soppakauuna

Compare all that to the roughly $220 million (€165 million) that has been spent in the US presidential race as of December 31, more or less evenly divided between the Democrats and Republicans.  And the race is far from over.  It’s expected that President Obama’s campaign alone will eventually raise a record-breaking billion dollars.  As everyone knows, everything is bigger in American.  Still, whether or not a cool billion is an obscene amount of money, it’s certainly mindboggling, and not just by Finnish standards. 

This Finnish presidential race, though dull by US standards, was more electrifying than recent races.  Niinistö’s win with nearly 63% of the vote would be seen as a landslide in the US, where margins are often very narrow.  But in Finland, voters have almost always rewarded career politicians, like Niinistö, who’ve spent decades paying their dues within one of the mainstream parties.  Over the years, Niinistö has held various high positions in government, almost won the presidency when he ran six years ago, and continues to be popular, so he probably seemed like the most obvious choice for many people.  

Against that background, the fact that Haavisto inspired enough support to force Niinistö into a second round of voting is impressive enough.  The surge in Haavisto’s funding surely helped his campaign, as well as the use of social media by his supporters, such as a flash-mob video posted on Youtube. 

For a first-time candidate from a minor party, and one who’s openly gay (which even in Finland might turn some voters off), Haavisto’s 37% share of the final vote is totally respectable.  That doesn’t mean it’s any less of a disappointment for his supporters, which seemed to have included most people I know (my neighborhood went 40% for Haavisto).  My daughter said she and all her friends would have voted for him if they had been old enough, which should give Haavisto some solace.  Six years from now, with the younger generation coming of age, the outcome might be very different. 

Go Newt, Go Figure

After last weekend’s elections in Finland and America, both countries are closer to choosing a president.  In the case of Finland, a lot closer.  Practically done, in fact.  For the US, however, it is still a long slog, but with some fascinating twists sure to come. 

The Finnish poll turned out as expected with Sauli Niinistö getting the lion’s share of the vote, some 37 percent.  The Green Party candidate, Pekka Haavisto, also as expected had a strong showing, though squeaking into second place only 1% ahead of the third-place finisher, veteran politician Paavo Väryrnen.  Niinistö and Haavisto now continue to the next round, to be decided a week from today.  Early voting has already started. 

A couple of encouraging things to note from the first round.  “True Finn” Timo Soini came in a distant fourth with only 9.4% of the vote, a far cry from the nearly 20% his party garnered in the parliamentary election that shook things up so much last spring.  However, it might be wise not to read this as a complete repudiation (almost wrote refudiation there, shades of Sarah Palin!) of the xenophobic party that Soini represents.  The presidential race here has more to do with the individual candidate, not the party, which helps explain how Haavisto’s personal popularity outstrips the Green Party’s relatively low level of support (only 10 MPs in a 200-member parliament). 

The other positive takeaway was the turnout.  A few weeks ago, I heard a Finn lamenting how people here don’t bother to vote as much as they should, with a typical turnout (he said) of only 60-something percent.  That sounded low to me, though not bad compared to voter turnout in the US.  Average turnout is around 50% for US congressional elections, maybe more for higher-profile White House races, which is pathetic for a country that prides itself as the model of democracy. 

It turns out that the 60-something figure for Finland claimed by my friend is indeed too low.  In the first election round last Sunday, almost 73% of voters turned out nationwide, and even more in Helsinki.  I can’t help but boast a little that turnout in my neighborhood was a whopping 85%.  As I’ve said, Finns are a civic-minded people.

While the Finnish election was satisfying, the one in South Carolina was absolutely galvanizing.  I even stayed up to watch the coverage on CNN, which started at one in the morning Helsinki time.  When the voting ended an hour later, CNN was ready within minutes to declare Newt Gingrich the winner, a stunning comeback for the Georgian who had until a week earlier been badly trailing Mitt Romney in the polls.  Not only did Gingrich beat Romney, he trounced him by 13 points. 

The victory for Gingrich, which keeps him in the running and denies Romney an early anointment as GOP nominee, was bizarre.  And it highlights the bizarre, you could say even schizophrenic, nature of the Republican Party in 2012. 

The winner of the first 2012 Republican primary to be held in the conservative and religious South is a two-time adulterer who has most recently been attacking the GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney for being a capitalist tool.  Go figure.

Something like 65% of South Carolina GOP voters identify themselves as evangelical Christians, the most earnest and in-your-face type of churchgoers in a region that’s not known as the Bible Belt for nothing.  Yet by a margin of nearly 2 to 1, this devout demographic voted for a man who has traded in not only his wife three times, but also his faith.  He was born a Lutheran, became a Southern Baptist while in college, then converted in 2009 to the Catholicism of his current wife. 

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this; it’s just a bit ironic a deep-red, born-again state like South Carolina doesn't have a problem with it.  You could think that Gingrich’s flipping churches is his way of applying free-market principles to religion.  If a particular religion doesn’t serve your needs, why not shop around for one that does?  At least you have then given the matter of religion more thought than most people, who usually stick with the faith that was chosen for them by accident of birth.  That's the charitable way of looking at it.  When it comes to Gingrich’s ditching his first two wives, I'm afraid there’s no charitable way of looking at that.  None at all. 

This is beside the point anyway. It’s not that Palmetto State voters chose Gingrich because they admired his freewheeling attitude toward spouses or churches.  (After all, as people always like to point out, redemption is an important tenet of Christianity – good news for the occasional politician or clergyman caught with their pants down.) 

And South Carolinians’ enthusiasm for Gingrich probably has nothing to do with his critique of Mitt Romney’s money-grubbing business skills, which were dubbed “vulture capitalism” by leftist Rick Perry before he dropped out of the race.  South Carolina voters seem to be riled up for Newt mainly because they are mad as hell, and they see in Gingrich someone who not only shares their blinding anger at Obama and the Democrats, but also is also snarly enough to fight. 

If voters didn’t think so before, they saw the light when Gingrich lashed out at CNN debate moderator John King, who had the nerve to ask Gingrich about claims from Gingrich’s second wife that he had asked her for “an open marriage” so that he could carry on unhindered with his mistress Callista.  With that outburst, he won their hearts.

South Carolina may well turn out to be a fluke, however, since mainstream Republican leaders and pundits have piled on Newt, and polls in Florida, where voting next takes place on Tuesday, are showing Gingrich back in his familiar second place, far behind Mitt Romney.  Maybe even yesterday’s endorsement from Herman Cain won’t be enough of a boost to save Gingrich.  Come to think of it, a nod from Cain might be the last thing Newt needs. 

Anyway, I’ll probably be drifting off to sleep in front of the TV in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, watching to see how Gingrich fares in Florida.  Looking ahead, I can’t wait to see what happens with Gingrich on Super Tuesday in my, and his, home state of Georgia – not as diverse as Florida, but not as reactionary (I hope) as South Carolina. 

Maybe it doesn’t matter.  I have a feeling that by the time March 6^th rolls around, karma will finally bite and Georgia Republicans will no longer have the option of voting for their native, and very prodigal, son.  

Horse Races

It’s fashionable, and totally correct I might add, to carp about how politics – the very serious business of organizing how people are governed – is all too often reduced to a horse race.  Who’s up, who’s down, who’s ahead of whom in the polls, by how many points, yada, yada, yada.   

I have to confess.  I’m one of those bad people who love to view politics as a spectator sport, which probably points to a defect in my character or at least a sad statement on the state of my life. 

So, for a political junkie like me, this is shaping up to be a lost weekend at the racetrack.  There are gripping elections in both the US and Finland. 

Well, maybe it’s an exaggeration to say “gripping” in the case of the Finnish presidential election, which takes place tomorrow, Sunday.  Compared to the Las Vegas sheen of recent US campaigns, the election here in Finland is, let’s say, understated.  The numerous televised debates between the eight candidates have much more in common with Charlie Rose than American Idol.  In terms of squabbling, they haven’t even reached the level of the McLaughlin Group.  (I realize some of these public-affairs TV shows will be familiar only to political junkies like myself, so starved for entertainment as we are.) 

Also, you can make the case that the race for Finnish president doesn’t mean that much, since in Finland’s parliamentary system the president doesn’t have much power beyond setting foreign policy. 

Still, Finns are generally very civic-minded, so when they go to the polls to elect a president every six years they take it seriously, as they should.  And, with the political landscape in flux here, there’s probably even keener interest than usual in the outcome of this election.  The surprising success of the reactionary True Finns party in parliamentary elections turned Finnish politics on its ear last spring.  And the on-going European debt crisis keeps calling into question Finland’s role in the EU, as well as all kinds of domestic economic issues here. 

This uncertainty notwithstanding, there is practically no doubt who will win tomorrow’s election.  The conservative National Coalition Party’s Sauli Niinistö is sure to be the next president, according to polls, breaking the Social Democrat’s 30-year hold on the presidency.  (As a point of interest, the “conservative” party here occupies about the same spot on the political spectrum as the Democrats in the US.)  The weakness of the long-dominant Social Democrats is one of the biggest surprises in this race, as well as the projected poor showing of the True Finn’s candidate, Timo Soini.  

With the outcome seemly certain, the biggest question now centers on who will come in second.  In the Finnish system, if no one receives more than 50% of the vote, there is a runoff between the top two contenders.  With the vote being divided between eight candidates, it can easily happen.  Many people I know are voting for Pekka Haavisto, the hugely popular candidate of the Green Party, hoping he’ll make it to the second round. 

Haavisto, who is openly gay, seems to have been propelled to second place in the latest polls by his personal favorability, which is much higher than the level of support the Green Party itself enjoys.  As the results come in on Sunday, we’ll all be watching to see how good the news is for Haavisto and how bad it might be for Soini, who is running a distant fourth in the polls and has no chance of making it to the second round. 

Before then, an even more interesting question will be resolved – who wins in South Carolina.  Like Ground Hog Day, what happens today will decide whether “spring” has come for Republicans, or if they might have to slog through six more months of GOP winter.  The conventional wisdom is that a win by frontrunner Mitt Romney in this deeply conservative state, and the first in the South to vote, will settle the issue. 

Romney’s anointment seemed like a done deal until this past week, when feisty Newt Gingrich surged in the polls and bumbling Rick Perry narrowed the field by quitting.  I’m on pins and needles about this.  I can’t say for sure whom I want to win.  I’m hoping that Republicans, after carefully vetting each candidate and weighing their true devotion to conservative values, will choose the man absolutely best suited to go up against Obama in November, and lose. 

Many Tea Party Republicans hate Obama for pushing through “Obamacare” health insurance reform, which was largely modeled after “Romneycare”, created by none other than Mitt Romney.  I relish the thought of Tea Party supporters, who want to kick out the president because of Obamacare, having to vote for the man who made the template for it. 

As great as it would be to see Republicans face that dilemma, I still worry that Romney comes across as reasonable (dare I say, sane) enough to be a real threat to Obama.  So, imagine my excitement by the prospect of Newt regaining his vigor in South Carolina and giving Romney a real run for his money.  For all his presidential good looks and slick operation, Romney lacks the passion that true conservatives seem to be searching for, the passion needed to win their hearts.  Passion is one thing that Newt has – an abundance of it, in fact.  He is so passionate about so much that it can be heartbreaking at times – just ask the two ex-wives he cheated on. 

We now have the titillating possibility of Gingrich winning South Carolina, staying in the race and, who knows, catching enough fire and momentum to ride Tea Party anger and resentment all the way to the convention in Tampa.  Thinking what a spectacle a race between Obama and Newt would be, I have no choice but to "endorse" Newt Gingrich as the GOP candidate.  (Now, there’s a game changer!)  Still, given how surreal US politics have become, there’s a little voice in my head that says, “What if he actually wins?” 

Then, sweet Jesus help us all.