HS Analysis | Yle’s cuts are far from what the Basic Finns wanted

Parliamentary parties were able to on Thursday to consensus About the future of public broadcasting.

They decided on the report, which defines how much Yle’s funding will be cut and what the limits of Yle’s operations will be in the future anyway.

The compromise has been refined with a monthly trade. The working group sat more than 30 times in 11 months, but did not want to come to a conclusion.

Chairman of the working group Matias Marttinen (kok) called the agreement “fragile”, and that’s exactly what it is.

The difficulty was due to the fact that the majority of the parties did not want to cut Yle as much as Perussuomalaiset (PS).

Even for the Congress of course proper surgeries will work. However, it was important, if not most important, for the Prime Minister’s Party that all parliamentary parties accept the Yle report. The coalition wants Yle to be decided in a parliamentary manner, as in the past.

This is important because it is considered to increase the broad acceptance of the decisions. The coalition does not want to destroy the long tradition of parliamentary decisions in Finland by taking its turn as the prime minister’s party.

It would be good for basic Finns if the government decides on Yle’s funding. This would probably have weakened Yle’s credibility, because the government would have had at least a theoretical opportunity to blackmail Yle with funding.

Now, the tradition of parliamentarism continues with a bang, because one MP’s Liike Nyt was excluded from the compromise.

Working group chairman Marttinen already made the first compromise proposal in July, which was rejected by the Left Alliance after a discussion. The Greens and Liike Nyt also stood against it. Without the opposition of the left-wing coalition, the Greens would probably have accepted the original compromise.

“

Basic Finns knew how to blackmail other parties with important parliamentarism.

Thursday the approved report is not much different from the one that failed in July. According to HS’s information, only four very small changes were made to the now approved compromise.

This he admitted also the MP who represented the left-wing coalition in the negotiations Aino-Kaisa Pekonen.

The first point of change is strange to say the least.

According to it, “Yla must take care that Finnish legislation and working conditions are followed in the productions and works procured from outside the company.”

This should be clear for domestically sourced work, but how on earth can Yle demand compliance with Finnish laws in the foreign productions it acquires?

The Left Alliance and the Greens tried to get at least a relaxation of Yle’s surgery schedule, but it didn’t work out for basic Finns.

According to HS’s calculations, Yle’s funding will be cut by a maximum of 10 percent in 2027.

Basic Finns knew how to blackmail other parties with parliamentarism, but in reality they did not succeed as well as, for example, the Left Alliance tries to say.

The decided cuts are far from what ps would have wanted to do. In this sense, the green-left parties even did quite well. Ps is trying to feed the idea that 200 million euros will be cut from Yle.

It is a cumulative cut from all years, so it is not a cut to Yle’s annual budget. It will be at its highest in 2027, when the cut will be 66 million euros compared to the situation where Ylen would not continue operating as it is now.

Yle’s allocation this year is 594 million euros.

Left Alliance on the other hand played quite a dangerous game.

It tried to get a better future for Yle than the one decided now, but in the game, so to speak, the child meant to go with the bathwater.

There was a real danger that Perussuomalaiset would not have accepted the September compromise if the funding cut had been reduced. The end result could have been both a break in the tradition of parliamentarism and even bigger cuts from Yle.

Yle episode was yet another example of how far the Fundamental Finns and green-left parties are from each other.

This was also heard from the press conference held on the report, where the Greens and leftists said that it was not a real negotiation but a take-it-or-leave-it situation. In the opinion of basic Finns, such talk is hysteria.

In this situation, Marttinen’s compromise can be considered an achievement, without taking a position at all on what the content of the report should have been.