Column|It’s easy for the Left Alliance, because it doesn’t have to appeal to as large a crowd as the Sdp.
I participated at the end of August for the summer meeting of the coalition’s parliamentary group in Kuopio and Joensuu.
The treat of the summer meetings is to pay attention to what claims the parties are trying to spin, i.e. feed purposefully into the media.
It really stung my ear when it was specifically claimed from the coalition that the Left Alliance is the spiritual leader of the parliamentary opposition, i.e. the non-government parties. Spinning or not, the argument is solid and not silly at all.
However, the assumption that Sdp is the largest party in the opposition is surprising. The Left Alliance has 11 and the Sdp has 43 MPs. Maybe the coalition wants to send a message with its argument that the Sdp is messed up, and that’s pretty much true too.
Today it is customary to emphasize that those who think green-left may just as well vote for the Sdp, the left-wing coalition, as well as the greens. This was experienced especially in the European elections, where the chairman of the left-wing coalition Lee Andersson got almost as many votes on its own as the government’s brawlers Perussuomalaiset and Rkp combined.
The claim about the spiritual leadership of the Left Alliance can be justified. The Greens and SDP are watching carefully how the Left Alliance votes in parliament and not the other way around.
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The SDP and the Greens follow the voting behavior of the left alliance.
The Left Alliance voted squarely against Yle’s cut proposal. and soon so did the greens. This would hardly have happened if the Left Alliance had voted in favor of the report.
Left Alliance will hardly be able to become the next prime minister’s party. It frees the party to implement stricter left-wing policies than Sdp, which has to please a huge electorate.
But. In Yle’s latest support survey, the support of the left-wing party fell the most among the parties. The miracle worker Andersson is now in Brussels. Spiritual leadership is very much up to the next chairman of the Left Alliance. New chairmen rarely become the masters of the game right away.
However, the future chairman of the Left Alliance has a chance to do that. He is able to pursue a tougher opposition policy, because he does not have to appeal to more than a tenth of the electorate.
The author is HS’s politics editor.
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