The municipal elections here in Finland, that is.
Around 61% of those eligible to vote did so. Seeing the results, I actually hope that the percentage could have been even lower, as many braved the rain and cold to vote for all kinds of yahoos.
In my dream-world assemblymen would be people with real knowledge — maybe university professors, maybe municipal bureaucrats, maybe people with administrative experience from other fields, like teachers and businessmen.
Not models.
Not footballers.
Not ex-reality show falling stars.
Aaargh.
Apparently people just think that “What the hey, I’ve seen him/her before! And looked decent and did well there!” — no matter that the observed success was in chasing a puck round the hockey rink. Or in summoning crocodile tears to please show judges and the judging public. Snide remarks could be made about the applicability of these skills to politics, but they don’t represent the sort of wisdom you’d want a politician to have.
Personally I have this weird opinion that being famous isn’t an indication that you’re good at anything, and certainly not an indication that your voting record, or even attendance, at the municipal assembly would be better and more thought-out than that of, oh, say, a five-pound lump of granite.
Then again, such random votecatchers are useful (even if they occasionally get elected) for the same reason student candidates and immigrant candidates are eminently useful: every single vote for a party candidate, no matter how fringe and obscure, helps that party’s big, established guns. The details are interesting but long, so go to Wikipedia for the D’Hondt method if you want to know more.
Oh, and the parties? Nationwide, the big three indistinguishables — National Coalition, Center, and Social Democrats — each got their usual around 20% each. In case you wonder, they were the parties of business, farmers and factoryfolk once, but nowadays there’s little difference between them, and I think most of that is because of ancient grudges and hang-ups.
The scarily zealous Greens got 9%, the usually-sane Left Alliance around the same. The populist True Finns gained hugely and the venerable Swedish-speakers’ party lost slightly to get around 5% each, and the uncomfortably conservative Christian Democrats ended at around 4% (neener neener). Other parties got negligible percentages.
Except for the True Finns, no great changes happened; they rose from around half a percent to five. Incidentally, I wonder if they do realize how dumb their official English name sounds? Who are the non-true Finns? Then again, the party’s name Perussuomalaiset translates more accurately as “run-of-the-mill Finns” or “stereotypical Finns”…
Oh, and about the field: I’d guess that the Christian Democrats are near the rightmost fringe of Finnish politics; this places them a bit to the left of the Democrat party over there in America. (“This is madness!” — “This… is… Europe!“)
So: elections over, scoundrels and incompetents chosen, but if all goes well they’ll spend so much time butting their bony heads together that they’ve no time to do much evil.
Incidentally: I voted. I got my candidate by rotating the lottery-like Internet election candidate comparison-a-rama netmachinery until I found one non-yahoo — one candidate whose screaming lunacies were about things I don’t much care about. I looked for a bit more but couldn’t find another, so the choice was easy. My candidate failed, but his party slipped a few bozos into the local assembly.
Oh, and Americans, since you have an election coming up, too, and since your politicians have scary amounts of power: Please, anyone, anyone except the maverick dotard and the Alaskan nutjob. Please?
(Oh, Yle the ever-reliable Finnish news service has the full results.)
