Antti Rinne, the government negotiatior and chairman of the Social Democratic Party, walked in front of the Finnish media on Wednesday noon to reveal, which political parties he has selected to join the government negotiations that are to begin today at the the House of the Estates.
They are the Green League, the Left Alliance, the Swedish People’s Party and the Centre Party.
The National Coalition Party and the Finns Party were not selected to join the negotiations.
According to Rinne, mutual ground with the aforementioned parties was found during the negotiations in the past few days and, of course, in the answers to the 10 questions that Rinne had sent to the party leaders on April 26.
The questions ranged from global warming to how to strenghten internal security.
“55 percent of Finns have voted these parties. 1.7 million people, the absolute majority of Finns, are behind voting these parties,” Rinne iterated several times during the press conference, when asked for an example, why the Finns Party, who came second in the elections, scoring one seat less than the SDP, was not included in the government negotiations. (The SDP received 40 seats, the Finns Party 39. There are 199 seats in the parliament.)
According to Rinne, the new potential government can be called “the makers of the future.”
Update May 9: The paragraph about Rinne’s questions stated that one of his questions was linked to immigration. In fact, there were no direct questions about immigration. However, there were questions that could be related to immigration, such as “What are the risks for internal security and how would you strengthen internal security?
