On the current 2012 municipal elections, for expats

Update: I got 362 votes in Helsinki, which means I can negotiate for a seat on a committee.

Is this the first time you’re hearing about the local or “communal” elections in Finland? No wonder. Officials, the media and running candidates have done a substandard job informing non-Finnish speakers in Finland. My article will mainly concern the elections in Helsinki but information here is useful regardless of where you live in Finland.

Did you know that you can vote in October 2012?

You have the right to vote in the municipal elections if you were 18 years of age by September 7th 2012 and you are:

1. A citizen of a EU member state – or Iceland or Norway.
2. OR You have officially lived in Finland for two years by Septemeber 7th, 2012.

You should have received an unintelligible letter in Finnish in the mail, looking like this:

What are the current political issues in Helsinki?

• Apotti/Epic is an antiquated healthcare IT system that municipalities plan to buy for 2 billion euros plus maintenance. With this kind of money we could easily employ every single software developer in Finland and produce a working system instead of the hopelessly broken one Accenture is trying to sell us.
• The shortage of reasonably priced apartments is a major cause of homelessness and working class poverty in Helsinki. Various solutions have been proposed but conflicts of interest between the public good, car-ownership and business are proving to be a hard knot to unravel.
• By continuing current low density urban planning policies, Uusimaa will become even more like an archipelago of desolate, poorly connected suburbs of Helsinki. Do you like the Finnish forests or agricultural landscapes? With current building codes you can forget about them. Kokoomus and SDP are generally favoring a car centric, sprawling suburban route..
• We quickly need public transportation that’s reasonably priced and more efficient. Currently, many people favor cars simply because they have to. The prognosis for traffic fluidity as Helsinki grows are terrible: journey time are likely to double. Everyone who can’t afford to or doesn’t want to live in the old city center or near the railway stations will waste their lives on being stuck in traffic.
• Corruption exists also in Finland, just outside of the public eye. Public decision-making in municipalities needs more transparency to overcome this.

The three largest parties (in order of size in the Helsinki city council)

• The National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), 26 seats: centre-right, both conservative and liberal candidates. NCP is seen by many as favoring the wealthy, advocating car-ownership and tolerating corruption among its politicians. Kokoomus’ response to inefficient city bureaucracy is cutting resources and straining competent city workers.
• The Green League (Vihreät), 21 seats: centrist-green liberal. I myself am a Green League candidate in Helsinki.
• The Social Democrats (SDP, 16 seats): These guys protect the privileges of the folks employed by the city of Helsinki. Or at least of the older employees. In my own professional life I’ve encountered lots of unmotivated civil servants resisting change in the city bureaucracy, and there’s no way to get rid of them. The social democrats will do nothing in order to link city workers to normal union policies rather than absurd multi-year termination of employment contracts.

Other points
The nationalist conservative populist party ”True Finns” or ”Perussuomalaiset” headed by Timo Soini is expected to gain seats in the municipal councils around Finland, following their rise to a major party in Parliament in 2011. Though the party’s listed policies themselves aren’t outspokenly racist or anti-immigrant, many of their candidates and supporters are (as illustrated by this collection of Facebook and blog posts). Some of them have ties to neo-nazi organisations and other nationalist movements such as the Finnish Defence League or the Finnish Resistance Movement.

The author is a candidate number 1023 for the Helsinki City Council.