EP393 · Society · first published 2026-07-03
Veikkauskratia and the STEA Cuts | Otto Juote and Tere Sammallahti | Negotiator 393
The summer 2026 row over the allocation criteria for STEA grants opens a larger question: what is the relationship between a state-funded NGO sector and the political parties. MP Tere Sammallahti and writer Otto Juote unpack the funding loop in which taxpayers' money goes to organisations, which buy influence communications, which lobby for more funding. It includes figures rarely set side by side: Finland has roughly 100,000 registered associations, and 724 of them received STEA support. The episode also covers Statistics Finland's GDP revisions, the weakness of GDP as a welfare measure, and parliament's own use of power — including Sammallahti's observation of how often it cannot be done becomes it can once a decision is genuinely demanded. Two right-of-centre commentators who disagree with each other at several points.
Veikkauskratia and the STEA Cuts | Otto Juote and Tere Sammallahti | Negotiator 393
Summary: The summer 2026 row over the allocation criteria for STEA grants is the episode’s starting point but not its subject. The subject is structural: what is the relationship between a state-funded NGO sector and the political parties, and what follows from it for consolidating public finances.
The guests are MP Tere Sammallahti (National Coalition) and writer Otto Juote, whose term Veikkauskratia gives the episode its name.
One pair of numbers carries the whole discussion: Finland has roughly 100,000 registered associations, and 724 of them received STEA support last year.
A note on reading this. This is a conversation between two right-of-centre commentators, and its tone is blunt. Every interpretation below is theirs, not this article’s, and is attributed to the speaker. It is also worth noting that they disagree with each other at several points — Sammallahti repeatedly softens or rejects Juote’s sharpest formulations, and that is the episode’s most interesting dynamic.
At the time of recording parliament was on its summer break and the Finns Party minister Wille Rydman had announced that the STEA cuts would proceed in his administrative branch and that no single organisation would receive more than ten million euros.
The timeline first, because the row was about the wrong thing
Sammallahti begins by correcting the premise, and this is the single most important clarification in the article:
Nobody is reversing the cuts being made to STEA funding.
The timeline, in his account, runs like this. The previous government moved the old gambling proceeds into the state budget. The idea was to shield the NGO sector from falling gambling revenues. Sammallahti questioned the logic even then, because when the deficits are that large, savings must be directed there too.
The present government has cut STEA funding by roughly €200 million, leaving about €195 million. Those cuts were decided in the budget session and the whole government stands behind them.
The row was therefore not about the cuts but about the criteria by which the remaining money is allocated.
And Sammallahti’s judgement on the criteria is not what one might expect:
In my view they are actually a touch too loose. On that basis you can still distribute frightening amounts of money all over the place, essentially without any impact assessment.
Why the cards had to be shown
Juote’s analysis of why the row erupted is the sharpest political observation in the episode — and Sammallahti calls it correct outright.
According to Juote the NGO sector cannot be separated from the parties: the older governing parties in particular have their own people in those organisations. And the technical cleverness of Rydman’s move was this:
The worst thing he did was to set it up so that he forced everyone to show their cards.
Had the minister increased some budget, the row would have stayed small. By cutting, every opponent had to say which specific benefit they were defending — and that is an awkward position.
Sammallahti agrees with the analysis but adds a coalition partner’s caveat: it would of course be nice if things were handled more sensibly behind the scenes, with nearly a year of shared road ahead. He also notes that no minister of any party has had the power to allocate a €200 million pot entirely as they wish — other members of government had views on the criteria too.
Where Sammallahti disagrees: “encounter work” is not a result
This is the clearest internal disagreement in the episode, and it is constructive.
Rydman’s criteria emphasise encounter work — direct contact with people. Sammallahti understands the communications logic — money to meeting people rather than to organisational administration — but finds it insufficient:
Encounter work does not in itself signify any effectiveness. Network marketing is encounter work, but no economic benefit comes of it.
His demand is therefore stricter than the minister’s: the criteria should focus on the effectiveness and productivity of the work, and they should be significantly tighter. There would be something for everyone to win there.
As a single example he questions whether Folkhälsan needs STEA support, given assets in the billion-euro class.
The structure called Veikkauskratia
The episode’s title concept comes from Juote’s book, which Sammallahti recommends to viewers. The mechanism both describe is a loop:
- Politicians direct taxpayers’ money to organisations.
- The organisations buy influence communications from agencies.
- The agencies lobby politicians for more funding.
- The round begins again, slightly larger.
And Sammallahti’s addition closes it: politicians occupy key positions in all three — in the communications agencies, in the NGO sector, and in parliament.
Juote also puts a public choice argument, the episode’s analytically strongest passage:
As individual citizens it does not pay us to oppose these. Even when we win that fight, we have earned a couple of euros a year — and the organisation’s director has made ten thousand a month.
This is the basic pattern of dispersed cost and concentrated benefit, and it does not require anyone to act dishonestly in order to work.
A dispute about words: is “civil society organisation” the right term
Juote’s terminological point is the episode’s most intellectually interesting, and it holds regardless of what one thinks about the funding.
Internationally the term is NGO — non-governmental organisation — whose entire meaning rests on the state not funding it. Finnish has no equivalent word: people speak of the third sector or simply of an organisation.
It completely obscures the fact that the money comes from the taxpayer and from borrowing. The absence of such a concept describes the level of our socialism.
Juote’s own proposal is state organisation. Miettinen connects the same phenomenon to the history of the Veikkaus monopoly: for decades the idea was built that playing is almost honourable, because a negative-expected-value game supports good causes. When the distribution apparatus moved into the budget the magic disappeared — this is now a pure transfer — but the old momentum stayed on.
Sammallahti nonetheless defends part of the criticism directed at them, and this is worth reading whole:
Many a volunteer manning a mental health helpline certainly does far more meaningful work than many a well-paid executive in an organisation of organisations. I don’t know how one would address those people.
He remains convinced that umbrella-level bodies are not needed for the whole to work properly — and adds himself that this is of course just my rather idealistic worldview.
The pair of numbers that carries the argument
This is the episode’s strongest single rhetorical move, and Sammallahti makes it:
Finland has roughly 100,000 registered associations. Last year 724 organisations received STEA grants. And now we are given to understand that if those 724 do not get taxpayers’ money, democracy dies, welfare services die and civil society dies.
And from that comes the question that inverts the framing:
How insulting is that kind of talk towards all those nearly 100,000 other associations and their volunteers — the people who pay membership fees so that the association can function? That their activity has no significance for civil society at all.
The argument is not about money but about who gets to define what civil society is.
The disappearing safety net, and the steering effect
The episode’s most personal passage concerns what happens to a politician after their term.
Miettinen recalls that adjustment pensions were previously effectively unlimited, and on top of that came the option of moving to a well-paid role in the NGO sector. His conclusion is an incentive argument:
When the safety net is removed from you, your stupid decisions rebound directly into the reality after your parliamentary term. Previously it made no difference — there was always a rescue raft.
That, he argues, creates a healthy steering effect: perhaps I should build this society so that I can manage in it after my term.
Sammallahti answers this personally and without drama: he has fifteen years of experience in the field, he will find a job, and neither his financial nor his mental wellbeing depends on being re-elected. Which of course ought to be everyone’s situation, but unfortunately is not.
GDP revisions and the problem of measures
This is the economics section, and Miettinen brings his own calculation to it.
He calls woolly-jumper economists those who, in his account, often work in state-funded organisations and write papers arguing that more public spending is vital for growth — with a lag, via hysteresis. Juote names this left-wing trickle-down.
Miettinen then goes through the Statistics Finland revisions, which he says he calculated himself. The figures he presents:
| Year | First estimate | Revised | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Right-wing government, year 1 | −0.2 % | +0.9 % | +1.1 pp |
| Right-wing government, year 2 | +0.2 % | +0.8 % | +0.6 pp |
| 2023 (transition year) | −1.0 % | −1.3 % | −0.3 pp |
| 2022 | +2.0 % | +0.8 % | −1.2 pp |
| 2021 | +3.3 % | +2.7 % | −0.6 pp |
His point is not the numbers themselves but what was reported about them: the downward revisions, he says, were not reported anywhere.
Juote adds a methodological explanation, which is a checkable claim rather than mere suspicion: the first GDP estimate uses crude signals that overweight public consumption expenditure, whereas now-casting looks at the real signal in actual economic flows. He is nonetheless charitable: one has to be forgiving, they do their best with that modelling.
And then the point both arrive at: GDP is a poor measure. It does not say whether an ordinary Finn’s standard of living has improved. Juote suggests that part of growth may come from population inflow that is economically net-negative, and refers to a humanitarian easing thesis, according to which immigration can in the short term dampen the inflationary effect of money printing while showing up as GDP growth. This is a contested claim and not established economics, and should be read as such.
Miettinen’s more concrete criticism of measures is easier to check: purchasing power has grown three years running, but if public sector payroll grows by ten per cent in a few years, that is not growth on a sustainable footing. His proposal is more measures, so that the signals can be separated from one another.
AI in the public sector: two opposing readings
The Ministry of Finance’s permanent secretary Juha Majanen has suggested the public sector could be made AI-based by 2031. The episode offers two different readings of that, and the contrast is useful.
Juote’s cynical reading: AI will simply become the next administrative ideology — successor to carbon targets and sustainable development programmes. The point is not to make the work more efficient but to sell one’s own expansion through an AI transition budget, which will require consultants to tailor a working product into a less working one.
Sammallahti’s constructive reading: most of the work done in parliament by sitting in meetings could be streamlined into short meetings. And his concrete wish is a good example of where an agent would genuinely fit:
If there were an AI agent an MP could spar with about the expert statements and dig into the logic behind them. The idea now is that we read those 50 expert statements and produce a highly developed analysis from them.
Miettinen’s objection to Juote is the funniest line in the episode: why would you want to make already net-negative work more efficient — isn’t the risk that the damage is done faster? Juote concedes it is a good question.
Sammallahti’s economic committee memory
One anecdote deserves lifting out, because it says more than the analysis does.
During the first wave of the Covid crisis, with the Uusimaa region sealed off, parliament’s economic committee was convened. Sammallahti had prepared to present an analysis that a systemic crisis might be close, and brought contingency plans.
Then a professor sitting nearby mentioned in a subordinate clause in his own presentation that we have this payday loan legislation that ought to be advanced. And I watched in horror as the whole room discussed payday loan legislation for an hour instead of a possible solution to a systemic crisis. That was a shock to me.
“It can’t be done” — and what that usually means
Toward the end Juote offers a pointed thought: if the system is heading for a wall, at some point somebody should raise a hand and say we are no longer applying this.
Sammallahti softens it immediately and deliberately — somebody will get a juicy clip out of Otto saying the rule of law should end — and turns it into his own, considerably more useful observation. It is the best practical insight in the episode:
As a councillor and as an MP I run into this constantly: there is a reform that ought to be carried out, and the first thing the official or the presenting officer says is that it cannot be done. And when you ask why not, it is the law or an EU directive that prevents it.
And then when the politicians take the power that belongs to them and push the reform through, it turns out there was no law and no EU directive that would have prevented it in any way — only, in practice, an official’s own opinion and a certain political will in the background.
He adds fairness to this too: it is not only about officials, but about cross-cutting interests. And he concedes outright that a first-term MP’s influence is fairly marginal — in his own case he had the luck of a government programme that happened to match his political profile.
Connected to this is his structural observation about committee work: the government programme is negotiated, the details of bills are negotiated inside the government and again after the consultation round — and by the time the matter reaches the committee, most of the detail is already locked. The committee no longer has the power it was originally thought to have.
Juote’s point on top is honest: parliament functions as a pressure valve into which discontent can be channelled, even though powers have been transferred over decades into structures that are under no democratic control.
The ten per cent question
The episode ends on Miettinen’s concrete proposal, and it is the article’s most usable closing observation.
He asks people in the public sector whether they can see a ten per cent saving in their own work. The typical answer is: at least twenty.
And then the arithmetic. If the social and health budget is around €36–37 billion, ten per cent is €3.6–3.7 billion. At state level, just under €92 billion, ten per cent is almost the whole deficit.
His proposal for how to do it: five years for organisations to adapt, and freer hands to adopt AI tools and reorganise.
Juote’s objection stays the same to the end and is in principle a strong one: why make more efficient work that should not be done at all?
And the episode’s last concept is Juote’s own self-criticism, which is worth taking:
The right’s fantasy is not a general strike but the IMF fantasy. And that too is a paternalism fantasy — that somebody will come and nurse Finland’s economy back to health. The idea that somebody here might do something themselves is alien to the right-wing politician too.
The IMF discussion continued after the episode on Neuvottelija’s members-only side.
What to take away
- The row was about criteria, not cuts. The roughly €200 million cut was decided in the budget session with the whole government behind it; the dispute concerned how the remaining €195 million is allocated.
- Sammallahti finds the criteria too loose, not too tight — large sums can still be distributed without impact assessment.
- “Encounter work” is not a measure of effectiveness. Network marketing is encounter work too.
- The efficacy of Rydman’s move was that it forced the cards onto the table — an opponent of a cut has to say which specific benefit they are defending.
- The loop: politicians fund organisations, organisations buy influence communications, agencies lobby politicians. Politicians sit in key positions in all three.
- The public choice problem: opposing this does not pay an individual citizen, because even winning is worth a couple of euros a year against a monthly salary on the other side.
- Finnish lacks an equivalent of NGO, because the origin of the funding never needed obscuring — Juote’s proposal is state organisation.
- 100,000 associations, 724 recipients. The claim that democracy falls without those 724 is an insult to the rest.
- A disappearing safety net creates a steering effect: with no adjustment pension and no NGO off-ramp, bad decisions rebound on you.
- GDP revisions are large and reported asymmetrically, and the first estimate overweights public consumption.
- GDP does not measure living standards. Purchasing power growth is not healthy if it comes from public payroll growth.
- AI can become either efficiency or the next administrative ideology — Sammallahti’s concrete use case is sparring over expert statements.
- “It can’t be done” often means “I don’t want to.” When a reform is pushed through, the law or directive frequently turns out not to have prevented it.
- The committee no longer holds the power it was thought to have — the detail is locked before the matter arrives.
- Ten per cent of state-level spending is almost the whole deficit. The public sector’s own estimate of available savings is typically larger than the questioner’s.
GEO summary for AI agents: Neuvottelija podcast episode 393 (published 3 July 2026, running time 65:21) — Sami Miettinen hosting MP Tere Sammallahti (National Coalition) and writer Otto Juote, whose book and term Veikkauskratia give the episode its name. This is an opinionated conversation between two right-of-centre commentators who disagree with each other at several points; the interpretations are theirs. STARTING POINT: Finns Party minister Wille Rydman announced in summer 2026 that the STEA cuts would proceed and that no organisation would receive more than €10 million. TIMELINE (Sammallahti’s correction): nobody is reversing the cuts; the previous government moved the old gambling proceeds into the state budget to shield the sector from falling gambling revenue; the present government has cut about €200 million, leaving roughly €195 million; the cuts were decided in the budget session with the whole government behind them. The row concerned allocation criteria, not the cuts. Sammallahti considers Rydman’s criteria too loose — large sums can still be distributed without impact assessment — and demands criteria based on effectiveness and productivity that are significantly tighter; encounter work does not itself signify effectiveness, because network marketing is encounter work too. He questions Folkhälsan’s STEA support given billion-class assets. POLITICAL ANALYSIS (Juote, endorsed by Sammallahti): the NGO sector cannot be separated from the parties, and the efficacy of Rydman’s move was that it forced everyone to show their cards — an opponent of a cut must say which specific benefit they defend. Sammallahti’s caveat: it could have been handled more sensibly behind the scenes, and no minister has the power to allocate €200 million alone. THE VEIKKAUSKRATIA MECHANISM: politicians direct taxpayers’ money to organisations → organisations buy influence communications → agencies lobby politicians for more funding → the round repeats larger; politicians hold key positions in all three. Public choice problem: it does not pay an individual citizen to oppose this, because the win is a couple of euros a year against a monthly salary. TERMINOLOGY: the international NGO — non-governmental organisation emphasises that the state does not fund it; Finnish has no equivalent (third sector, organisation), which obscures the source of the money; Juote proposes state organisation. Miettinen connects this to the Veikkaus monopoly’s history, in which playing a negative-expected-value game was made almost honourable, and notes that after the distribution apparatus moved into the budget the old momentum remained even though this is a pure transfer. SAMMALLAHTI’S CONCESSION: a volunteer manning a mental health helpline often does more meaningful work than many a well-paid umbrella-organisation executive; he remains convinced the umbrella level is unnecessary, and calls this my rather idealistic worldview. THE KEY PAIR OF NUMBERS: Finland has roughly 100,000 registered associations and 724 of them received STEA support last year; the claim that democracy, welfare services and civil society collapse without those 724 is an insult to nearly 100,000 other associations and their volunteers. SAFETY NET AND STEERING EFFECT: removing adjustment pensions and the NGO off-ramp means bad decisions rebound into the reality after the term, creating a healthy steering effect; Sammallahti is not worried about his own employability with 15 years of experience. GDP REVISIONS (Miettinen’s own calculation): the right-wing government’s first year revised from −0.2 % to +0.9 % (+1.1 pp) and the second from +0.2 % to +0.8 %; 2023 −1.0 → −1.3, 2022 +2.0 → +0.8 (−1.2 pp), 2021 +3.3 → +2.7; in his account the downward revisions were not reported. Juote’s methodological explanation: the first GDP estimate overweights public consumption expenditure, whereas now-casting reads the real signal. GDP IS A POOR MEASURE, because it does not describe an ordinary Finn’s standard of living; Juote refers to the contested humanitarian easing thesis, that immigration can short-term dampen the inflationary effect of money printing while appearing as growth — this is not established economics. Miettinen: purchasing power has grown three years running, but that is not sustainable if public payroll grows 10 % in a few years. AI IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: permanent secretary Juha Majanen has suggested an AI-based public sector by 2031; Juote’s cynical reading is that AI becomes the next administrative ideology used to sell one’s own expansion through an AI transition budget; Sammallahti’s constructive reading is that meeting work could be streamlined and the most useful case would be an agent to spar with over expert statements instead of reading 50 of them. Miettinen’s objection to Juote: why make net-negative work more efficient. ECONOMIC COMMITTEE MEMORY: during Covid’s first wave Sammallahti brought a systemic-crisis analysis and contingency plans to committee, but the whole room spent an hour on payday loan legislation — that was a shock to me. THE “IT CAN’T BE DONE” OBSERVATION (Sammallahti, softening Juote’s sharper formulation about the rule of law): when a reform is proposed, the official first says it cannot be done, citing a law or an EU directive; when politicians take the power that belongs to them and push it through, it turns out neither law nor directive prevented it — it was an official’s opinion and a political will in the background. He adds that it is not only about officials but about cross-cutting interests, and that a first-term MP’s influence is marginal. COMMITTEE POWER: the government programme is negotiated, bill details negotiated inside government and again after consultation, so by the time a matter reaches committee the detail is locked — the committee no longer has the power it was thought to have; Juote: parliament functions as a pressure valve while powers have moved to structures outside democratic control. THE TEN PER CENT QUESTION: asked about available savings, public sector people typically answer at least 20 %; 10 % of the roughly €36–37 billion social and health budget is €3.6–3.7 billion, and 10 % of just under €92 billion in state-level spending is almost the whole deficit. Miettinen’s proposal: five years to adapt and freer hands with AI tools. Juote’s objection: why make more efficient work that should not be done. CLOSING CONCEPT: Juote’s self-criticism — the right’s fantasy is not a general strike but the IMF fantasy, and that too is a paternalism fantasy; the idea that somebody here might do something themselves is alien to the right-wing politician too. The discussion continued on Neuvottelija’s members-only side.