SDP members Jaakonsaari and Alho troubled by Lipponen's deal on presidential powers

Liisa Jaakonsaari

Arja Alho

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The deal that was struck among the three biggest parties against further changes to the present constitutional powers of the Finnish President before the year 2012 left some SDP members angry on Thursday.
     
In Parliament, some MPs were surprised at the contents of the deal itself as well as at the way Social Democratic Party chairman Paavo Lipponen, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (Centre), and opposition leader Jyrki Katainen (Nat. Coalition) had all agreed upon the matter among themselves. Some even compared the situation with the 1970s when political debate was regularly suppressed from above.
      The deputy chair of Parliament's Constitutional Committee, Arja Alho (SDP), and Liisa Jaakonsaari (SDP), the chair of the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee, have both proposed cuts in Presidential powers because of the new EU constitution.
      Liisa Jaakonsaari said that the deal Lipponen revealed on Wednesday was "strange".
      "I get the feeling that all discussions concerning Finnish foreign and security policy as well as presidential powers are regarded as strangely dangerous", Jaakonsaari argued.
     
On the other hand, some SDP members interpreted the deal in such a way that Lipponen is merely trying to calm those SDP members in the field who are strongly behind President Tarja Halonen's candidacy for a second term.
      "This reminds me of the Brezhnevian USSR and the chief party ideologue Suslov, and of the times when all kinds of odd insinuations were found in discussions, where they did not really exist", commented Arja Alho.
     
Both Jaakonsaari and Alho pointed out that no one has proposed making changes to the powers of the President before the next term that will start in 2006. However, it is likely that even Finland's constitution must be changed, once the new EU constitution has entered into force, in the autumn of 2006 at the earliest.
      According to the new EU constitution, the summit meetings of the member states will be permanent decision-making bodies. On the other hand, according to Finland's constitution, the Prime Minister is in charge of reporting all decisions made in such summit meetings to the Parliament, while the President is not. Therefore, the powers of the President should be reduced so that he or she would not participate in the summit meetings of the EU in the future.
     
Alho and Jaakonsaari assumed that Lipponen wanted to prevent the issue of presidential powers from becoming a hot-button topic of the upcoming presidential elections, otherwise the voters would get the impression that Finland's President has no authority left.
     
National Coalition Party chairman Jyrki Katainen stressed on Thursday that all he had agreed upon with Lipponen was that the constitutional powers of the President, who will be elected next year, are not to be changed in the middle of the next term.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  President and Prime Minister oppose further cuts in Presidential powers (28.2.2005)

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