Left Alliance leader calls on party to give up "isms"

Siimes feels as if she had been "tortured"

Suvi-Anne Siimes

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Left Alliance chairwoman Suvi-Anne Siimes has called on her party to courageously let go of its various "isms". Speaking at her party's programme seminar on Saturday, Siimes said that when the Left Alliance was founded, the only reference made to socialism was that the party had been influenced by it.
      The Left Alliance was established in 1990, after the leftist Finnish People's Democratic League, and its largest member organisation - the Finnish Communist Party - shut down their operations.
      Siimes found it difficult to address the gathering. She said that she was still thinking late Friday evening whether or not she would be able to speak at all. It was only after speaking with a few key supporters that she had managed to get her emotions into check.
     
Siimes said that she had felt real physical pain in her role as chair of the party. Events within the party had felt like a "torture device" that tears a person's limbs apart one at a time. Operating Siimes's torture device was "the past".
      She also defined her own political history.
      "I have never been a communist. Also I have never been a socialist of any kind."
      Siimes said that she joined the Left Alliance partly because the party was shaking off its isms, and was moving toward values.
      There was no talk in any of the speeches about calls that had come from the trade union wing of the party that the Left Alliance should merge with the Social Democrats.
     
Siimes saw only one road for Finland's political left. "It is the road of openness, and of as extensive cooperation as possible."
      She called for opening all thinking with the future in mind; in her opinion, nothing can be achieved by focusing on the division that took place in 1918 - the year of the Finnish Civil War.
      "Some within our ranks apparently have difficulties in accepting even the change and the frame of reference that was decided upon in connection with the founding of the party."
      She said that many continue to see the party as a "vanguard of the east", and that there was bickering about "very strange things".
      "However, the world picture and way of thinking of the party programme must be of this world, and must open from the present to the future, and not to the world of the past."
     
Siimes's remarks got both support and criticism.
      MP Esko-Juhani Tennilä emphasised that the party is the natural continuation of the labour movement, which had operated for 100 years. He said that the party should hold on to its key "isms".


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