Sanna Marin has said that she wants to “shake up the prime minister institution”. In reality, however, politics is done as before, and power remains in the shadows, writes journalist and non-fiction writer Asta Leppä.
23.10. 2:00 am | Updated 18:19
When I was a teenager in the 80s, what did politics look like to me?
Mom’s sauna evenings, From Mauno Koivisto, from ties and boredom. If something in politics interested me, it happened outside the institutions, like on the dams of a wetland lake, but even that felt distant.
My generation, my own age, was quite apolitical. At most, we emancipated ourselves by wearing black clothes and pulling our hair up. Not everyone did even that.
The apoliticalness continued for decades. Now young people are more political again, although not in such a way that the change is reflected in voting activity. Or when it comes to joining parties – the average age of old parties is around fifty.
But the young people, they declare themselves to be a new creative generation, as always.
How is this reflected in the country’s party politics?
I say: just a little.
I listened interviewing millennial parliamentarians. I turned off the program: it was as if I was listening Paavo from Lippo. The same parsimony, diluted by ideology, was repeated like the page of the world. Even if you have appeared brashly on social media and as radicals in the youth organization, the institution of power tames the wild party-animals. Like a docent Rauli Mickelsson has pointed out, the hundred-year-old organizational structure of the parties will only ever do. In the end, everyone becomes a mass of cuckoos, we join the general party.
Sanna Marin has said that he wants to “shake up the prime minister institution”. But what has that shaking been limited to? Only to performativeness, to a new way of presenting a “genuine minute”, which basically doesn’t differ at all Matti Vanhanen from sweaters and Paavo Väyrynen from people’s passions.
The sauna evenings, where the affairs of the kingdom were decided “in secret” before, have also just changed their appearance. Instead of saunas, we now spar in the “palixes” of communication offices. Power stays in the shadows.
Professor Anu Kantolan According to A smiling cover face attracts you like a magnet. Of course, the difference between social media and traditional media is that you can’t speak jargon there, like in TV election campaigns. You have to master the catchy language of the attention economy.
But is this how the world is changing?
I asked from a young intellectual, how would he evaluate the subversiveness of the decision-makers of his own generation. From him, the radicalism of young people is now channeled into the fourth sector, into movements like Elokapina.
“Now we should look at those things, not people,” the young man sighed.
Like I’ve heard this before.
Helsingin Sanomat is organizing a debate program at the Helsinki Book Fair. Debate: Do different generations produce different decision-makers? Nonfiction author and journalist Asta Leppä will talk with economic sociology docent Arttu Saarinen and MP Iiris Suomela at the Helsinki book fair on Friday at 5:30 p.m., Senatintori stage. Available to watch live at HS.fi.
HS will publish debate columns during the coming week. In addition to Asta Lepä, the columns are written by Jenni Räinä (Mon), Teivo Teivainen (Wed), Anders Adlercreuz (Thurs), Riku Siivonen (Fri), Riikka Kaihovaara (Sat) and Maria Pettersson (Sun).
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