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EP320 · Society · first published 2025-04-02

April Fools' Media Against the Right | Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila | Negotiator 320

Recorded on April Fools' Day 2025, this Negotiation Club opens with an EVA survey in which 40 per cent of Finns see the public broadcaster as leaning left and 5 per cent as leaning right — an eightfold asymmetry. From there it moves to inheritance tax and what the debate leaves out: what comparable countries have done, where the money to pay the tax has to come from, and the fact that average adult wealth in Finland is EUR 150,000 against Sweden's EUR 300,000. The second half is Marine Le Pen's loss of eligibility and the structural problem it creates, why cordons sanitaires do not work, Finland's withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention, Greenland, and finally the question neither side asks: what did the money actually buy?

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society + AI and the Economy

April Fools’ Media Against the Right | Tere Sammallahti and Onni Rostila | Negotiator 320

Summary: The episode was recorded on 1 April 2025, and April Fools’ Day is its frame: Miettinen had just posted that nearly every MP and expert he had called supported replacing inheritance tax with capital gains taxation — and left the reader to guess whether it was true or a joke.

Its measurable core is an EVA survey: 40 per cent of respondents see the public broadcaster Yle as leaning left, 5 per cent as leaning right. What matters, on Rostila’s account, is neither number but the eightfold asymmetry.

Its best argument of principle is not about Finland. It is about Marine Le Pen, and it is Rostila’s: when a court removes the eligibility of the opposition’s leading candidate, the remedy becomes normal — and the next time it is used on somebody else.

A note on reading this. This is an opinionated conversation between two right-wing Finnish MPs, recorded two weeks before the spring 2025 municipal elections. The interpretations are theirs. Three things have been kept apart here: structural arguments, which hold up regardless of what the reader thinks; predictions, which can be wrong; and political provocation, which is rhetoric. Sarcasm and claims about the other side’s motives are marked as such and are not presented as observations.

The joke: a claim whose truth value the reader has to guess

Miettinen opens with what he had done that morning: written that he had been ringing MPs and experts and that nearly all of them thought a move from inheritance tax to capital gains taxation would pass — and, in the spirit of the day, left the audience to guess whether he meant it.

Out of that comes the episode’s governing analogy: there is media that works this way every day. The reader has to work out for themselves whether the source lied today or told the truth.

The EVA survey, and what followed it

EVA surveyed how Finns perceive the media, and the result was that Yle is seen as the most left-leaning outlet of all.

Rostila’s point is the ratio, not the level:

The figure went so that 40 per cent thought it leaned either clearly or somewhat left, and only 5 per cent thought it leaned right. That is the essential asymmetry.

He also states the counterfactual that makes the argument testable rather than a complaint: had the result been roughly symmetric, or the median somewhere in the middle, the criticism would not have had nearly as much of a point.

The timing sharpens it. About a week earlier the parliamentary transport and communications committee had held a public hearing on a citizens’ initiative on Yle, at which the CEO Merja Ylä-Anttila was asked about a left-wing bias and responded that there was no research on it. Now there is research — and, on Rostila’s account, no journalist has put the question again.

Rostila also recounts his own earlier video about the ideological composition of Yle’s column section and what came of it: the section’s producer closed their social media accounts and answered no questions, and the CEO dismissed the matter publicly. There were no consequences. The observation is then widened: Fortum’s Uniper loss ran to eight billion, and no sanction followed for anyone, neither as ministerial responsibility nor as the responsibility of a company’s management.

The cardigan economist and the cardigan journalist

The episode explains where Negotiator’s best-known coinage comes from. Miettinen says he invented the cardigan economist to describe economic journalism written without knowledge of how a market economy works. Visiting Ivan Puopolo’s studio, he was given the pair to it: the cardigan journalist.

The structure the term describes is more precise than its caricature, and Rostila states it without the insult: economics contains real dispersion across political orientations and value-laden choices, so whom an editor brings on to comment is genuine political power. If the commentators are systematically drawn from one side, the debate tilts — not because anyone is lying, but through selection.

Miettinen’s sharper version of the same: when something is put as “science says this” rather than “we think this”, the information value is negative.

Inheritance tax: three things that get lost under the percentages

The episode does not claim inheritance tax is a simple question. It claims three things drop out of the debate.

1. Comparable countries. Rostila puts this most cautiously and therefore most strongly — he even asks to be corrected if he is wrong: Finland’s key comparator and competitor countries have either abolished inheritance tax or relieve it considerably more than Finland does. When people and capital move across borders — which is the European Union’s own idea — it is simply not sensible to keep tax arrangements that create a strong incentive to leave for those who are able to leave.

2. Where the money to pay comes from. Inheritance tax is paid in cash. Out of a company, that cash comes after corporate tax and capital income tax.

3. The generational picture. Rostila makes an observation that cuts against the current system while also being a worry in its own right: the tax-free threshold is EUR 20,000, and half of the generation that grew up through the fastest growth and unprecedented abundance does not have EUR 20,000 in assets. He calls it a tragedy.

The counter-argument is stated too: a move to capital gains taxation would hit those on low incomes hardest, since most inheritances are currently untaxed. The episode does not refute this arithmetically — it sets alongside it the point that a Swedish economist would take the move as obvious from the standpoint of accumulating wealth across generations.

As an aside, a well-known professor of inheritance law is recalled (Sammallahti thinks it was Urpo Kangas, but is not sure) as arguing that one should spend it all oneself, since descendants have earned none of it. Rostila’s reply is the episode’s clearest non-economic value claim: securing a family’s and children’s financial safety has intrinsic worth, and that is lost if the state is made into the body that will always take care of everything.

A wealth comparison worth checking

Miettinen presents the figures from Statistics Finland’s 2023 wealth review together with the Nordic comparators:

Item Figure
Finland, average adult wealth ~EUR 150,000
Sweden ~EUR 300,000
Switzerland well over half a million
Finland, median wealth ~EUR 63,000
Relative to the Danish median about half

From these comes one of the episode’s thought experiments: if Finland’s 5.6 million and Sweden’s 10.4 million people were pooled into a single distribution, Finns would fall mostly in the poorest third. The argument is not that differences do not exist, but that policing differences within Finland crowds out the difference in level. The trigger is a piece in Helsingin Sanomat — Sammallahti recalls it as Juha-Pekka Raeste’s — which on his account repeats the idea of distributing wealth and polices the Gini coefficient. His jibe that this is a Soviet conception of a ruler handing out the good is rhetoric; the checkable part of the claim is that attention goes to the distribution rather than to the level.

Miettinen’s follow-up question to left-wing politicians is direct and therefore usable: where does the line for “rich” run? The rhetoric invokes the country’s best-known founders and financiers, but the policy lands on the top two income deciles, which a few thousand euros a month will reach.

The same figure, cut slightly differently, appears in Negotiation Club: Capital | Tere Sammallahti, Jussi Lindgren and Petri Roininen | Negotiator 316, which deals with why financial wealth and national wealth are not the same thing.

Le Pen: the argument that is not party political

The day before recording, a French court had convicted Marine Le Pen and barred her from standing for office over the use of European Parliament assistants’ funds. The episode’s treatment of this is its most careful passage, and it is worth separating from the rest of the rhetoric.

Rostila’s argument runs in four parts:

  1. Legitimacy. French judges are not elected, so they have no political legitimacy for removing the eligibility of the opposition’s leading candidate.
  2. Context. The National Rally would have been clearly the largest party at the last parliamentary elections had candidates from communists to right-liberals not been withdrawn from the second round precisely to prevent it. Millions of voters therefore already feel their dissatisfaction does not reach the process.
  3. Normalisation. This is the core. Once the remedy has been used, it exists. In ten or fifteen years the balance of power in France may be different, and then “some small irregularity” will be found and the same tool used in the other direction.
  4. External effect. It hands authoritarian governments outside Europe a perfect excuse — and a finger to point.

Rostila adds the caveat without which the argument would not persuade: he is no fan of Le Pen, and if the case has been understood correctly the offence is at best open to interpretation. He also notes that the Finnish debate about it has been lukewarm.

Sammallahti makes the same point by mirroring it: if a recognisably socialist party were banned in Europe over a comparable case, every leading article would be asking whether Europe is sliding into fascism.

Miettinen notes that a far-left commentator — Greece’s former finance minister — wrote about the same matter in the same terms: it is both a tactical and a principled error, and it smooths the path for exactly what it was meant to prevent. The parallel with the United States is explicit: Donald Trump’s polling rose when the wave of indictments was at its height.

Cordons sanitaires have not worked

From this follows the episode’s second structural claim: isolating parties simply does not work. Sammallahti says he has been making the point for years — the Finns Party was subjected to it fifteen years ago, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and it has worked nowhere.

What makes this more than a defensive plea is what isolation produces: victim status. Sammallahti puts it coldly and somewhat brutally — the next time something violent happens somewhere, support grows. The alternative is to include such parties and treat them as serious, at which point they are forced into substance and into carrying responsibility. Only then do the hard questions start for them.

Rostila adds the principle: if we have principles that separate us from authoritarian governments, they must be maintained even at the risk that somebody unpleasant wins an election.

Procedural fairness and committee leaks

Rostila takes the same thought home. The core of democracy, on his account, is procedural fairness: elections decide, and then that is what you go with. He gives a concrete example: while the employment and equality committee was handling the industrial peace act, information leaked from the committee in real time to Demokraatti, the Social Democrats’ paper — and cameras appearing at the committee door were the signal that something was coming.

As a counterweight he describes the previous term’s health and social services act: his party made the corrections the process allows for, they were voted down, the act passed, and that was that.

This is the passage to read most critically. The claim about procedural fairness is structural and checkable; the claim that the other side refuses to play by the same rules is one party’s reading of its own experience. They are not the same kind of statement, and the episode presents them back to back.

Bloc logic: why one party changes a government’s direction

Miettinen’s analysis, which Rostila endorses: if the populist right can be blocked, the coalition is forced to the centre, and a single centre-left party is enough to change the direction of a right-wing government — because it knows it is the trump card. The mechanism does not work in reverse: a small right-wing party does not change a left-wing government.

Miettinen says he would like a clear bloc election in Finland. Rostila adds the realism: he would like the option of forming a right-wing government even when the Social Democrats are the largest party, but wiser and more experienced people tell him it is not possible, because Finland respects the formateur’s position rather too much. This is a prediction and a wish, not an observation.

Rostila’s more durable point is about time scale: the achievements of one term will be left half-finished, and real change of direction would take three consecutive terms. One step forward and three back is, in his words, murderous.

The Ottawa Convention and how fast the world turned

On the day of recording, an hour or ninety minutes earlier, Prime Minister Orpo and Finance Minister Purra had announced that Finland would begin preparations to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention.

Rostila’s observation is not about mines but about the speed of change: ten or fifteen years ago Russia had just taken Crimea and people were explaining in parliament that the EU should not impose sanctions, that friendly relations should not be spoiled — and construction of Nord Stream continued. Two and a half years ago the position was different again. Security policy has taken enormous strides in a short time.

The return of old technology is noted in passing: the war in Ukraine has shown that a drill cartridge, a fuse and a small charge are effective devices in the end. Not everything has to be digital or satellite-guided.

Diplomacy is also personal chemistry

The episode’s most interesting non-ideological passage is about how a small country operates. Alexander Stubb’s round of golf with Donald Trump and the icebreaker deals are offered as an example that you have to play yourself into position. Miettinen says he had already discussed the icebreaker deals with Rydman more than a month earlier, and notes that hardly anyone in the media has written about them.

Rostila’s formulation is balanced and is the episode’s single best piece of practical advice:

You can think whatever you like about what Trump does or what Xi Jinping does, but when you go face to face and do international diplomacy, you don’t go there wagging your finger.

And he immediately draws the line: that does not mean accepting everything, grovelling, or agreeing to deals that are not favourable to us.

Both also name the problem in this: if the only channels toward Russia run through the United States, that is not an optimal position in the long run. Rostila puts this as a question rather than a position — and notes himself that it is fortunate he is not the one deciding when and by whom that contact is made.

Greenland, Vance and what actually irritates

Miettinen says he floated a deliberately neutral trial balloon on X — a map and the question who would defend Greenland? — and got interesting replies. The facts he raises: just under 60,000 inhabitants, and the only troops currently there are American.

Both draw a line about what has to be said out loud: if the United States took Greenland against Denmark’s or the Greenlanders’ wishes, that has to be stated. Rostila finds the claim that Denmark has been a poor ally particularly unjustified — Denmark has supported the United States more strongly than many other NATO members.

Sammallahti’s and Miettinen’s reading is that Trump himself is not especially interested in Europe, but that Vance’s and Musk’s irritation with Europe seems personally irrational. That is explicitly an interpretation of motives rather than an observation, and it is offered in the episode as a joke.

Rostila adds an analysis that is unusually self-critical about the alliance: the long-standing line of previous US administrations has in part been to keep Europe as a client state in security terms. It is therefore slightly schizophrenic to lecture Germany for not having looked after its own security.

And he states the uncertainty plainly: there are so many moving parts that nobody can predict the consequences. A year earlier nobody would have bet that Merz would be chancellor and that Germany would commit EUR 500 billion to defence.

Miettinen offers a frame he credits to Juhana Torkki, his co-author on Neuvotteluvalta: in the Stoic view the dice are thrown, and when they land you play the position you have. The Trump administration has been throwing the dice hard — and the outcome may still be good, if Europe starts taking responsibility for its own defence.

Inputs or outcomes — the episode’s best closing argument

The final theme should interest even readers who disagree with everything else.

Sammallahti says he made a video about cycling lessons for adults, which he took to be a peculiarity of one city and which turned out to run in three, including his own — a complete surprise to him as a city councillor there. The stated aim was to increase cycling and cycle maintenance services.

The argument is not about cycling lessons. It is about the measure:

If you throw, say, a hundred thousand at it, it probably increases somewhat. But by how much? What did we actually get for that money?

Rostila widens the same question to municipal administration as a whole: do we have relevant measures for what building control does, how zoning works, how education works — or is the aim in education merely to get people out of comprehensive school with some grade, after which it is somebody else’s problem?

Rostila adds artificial intelligence to this: as the productivity of handling and analysing information rises, public sector headcount cannot be treated as an employment effect. If the efficiency gains are real, the need for labour falls correspondingly.

Miettinen brings the same argument from the left: Ezra Klein had just published a book — Abundance came out two weeks before this recording — whose lesson for a defeated left is that the left celebrates the euros spent rather than the outcome. For once, equality of outcomes would be the right measure: what infrastructure, what improvement, how many homes — not how large the sack of money was.

Rostila’s version of why this is wrong specifically as rhetoric:

It is a nightmare, this saying to citizens: look, this is how much money we spent because we care about those people. But the conversation about what the money buys never happens.

And he adds the harder one still: what it removes from the market.

Sammallahti also makes a gentler human point from the same premise. One should not assume adults are incapable of learning: he has taught himself image editing and video editing, Miettinen has taught himself podcasting, and in politics you have to read an enormous amount of data every day and rearrange it into an analysis.

What the episode leaves you with

Three things stand out, and they should be judged separately:

  1. The Le Pen argument holds regardless of what you think of Le Pen. Normalisation is a structural mechanism, and it is the episode’s strongest passage because the person making it marks its limits himself.
  2. The EVA ratio is checkable. 40 against 5 is a different claim from “the media is biased” — and Rostila himself states the condition under which the criticism would have lost its ground.
  3. The effectiveness question is not right-wing. “What did the money buy” is put both to domestic municipal politics and, via a book reference, to the American left. It is the one place in the episode where the argument comes loose from a side.

What stands on the weakest ground is the talk about the other side’s motives: gaslighting, arrogance, ends justifying means. Those are provocations, and in the episode they run in the same stream as the checkable observations.

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