Finse coalitie voor medewerking aan hulppakket Portugal moeizaam tot stand gekomen (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Finland has managed to cobble together a parliamentary majority in favour of the €78 billion Portuguese rescue. But in doing so, the country has cast the eurosceptic and anti-bail-out True Finns to lead the official opposition.
On Wednesday, incoming prime minister Jyrki Katainen of the conservative National Coalition Party announced that he had won the backing of the centre-left Social Democrats for the bail-out,
With the support of the Centre Party, the Green League and other small parties, Katainen now has sufficient support in the chamber to give him a mandate in favour of the rescue expected to be authorised by EU finance ministers on Monday (16 May).
The parliament's powerful Grand Committee, the body that scrutinises policies relating to the EU, is to vote on the bail-out package on Friday (13 May).
The 39-year-old Katainen, who is also the outgoing government's finance minister, told reporters: "The crisis is not over and Finland cannot be the country which shakes the fragile situation by keeping things unresolved."
Finland, which uniquely in Europe requires parliamentary approval for the bail-out, was on the cusp of breaking the unanimity of eurozone member states needed to establish the new rescue package.
"I have the feeling that if we had not reached a deal here, it might have had a negative impact on other countries and also on the stability of the eurozone. Everyone must behave responsibly," Katainen added.
In order to win over the Social Democrats, who had also expressed their reservations about the bail-out over its effects on Portuguese society, was won over after a commitment that the government will seek out more burden sharing between financial institutions and taxpayers.
However, Brussels has said the programme is not negotiable, so it remains to be seen how successful Helsinki will be in this regard.
The conservative leader had previously said that he had separated the issue of building a parliamentary majority for the bail-out from that of constructing a permanent governing coalition, presumably including the three biggest parties - his own, the Social Democrats and the True Finns.
But the True Finns, who leapt from the fringes of politics in the country to almost a fifth of the vote and the third largest number of seats in last month's elections on the back of its criticism of the bail-outs, declared Thursday morning that they will sit in opposition due to their opposition to the rescue package and the EU's wider strategy in dealing with the eurozone crisis.
And the agreement between the conservatives and the social democrats declares that the new government - likely to comprise the National Coalition Party, the Social Democrats, and the smaller Green League, Swedish People's Party and Christian Democrats, who have 26 seats between them - that will be formed is to commit itself to the bail-out.
The complexion of the probable coalition will now be robustly pro-EU rather than something more watered down were the True Finns to have gone into government. But the opposition will now be its mirror image, robustly critical of the current eurozone crisis strategy.
The True Finns will lead the opposition rather than the Centre Party of outgoing prime minister Mari Kiviniemi i. Along side the True Finns with their 39 deputies will be the soft far-left Left Alliance, which comes out of the old Communist Party, with 14 seats, who also reject the Brussels consensus.
The True Finns mixes its policies from left and right. Sitting with the Freedom and Democracy eurosceptic grouping in the European Parliament alongside the more libertarian but still anti-immigrant Ukip, they nevertheless back a strong welfare state.
In indignant opinion piece written for the Wall Street Journal on Monday that could as easily come from a left-wing critic of EU-IMF austerity, their leader, Timo Soini, denounced the eurozone crisis strategy - what he called the "Brussels-Frankfurt extortion racket" - as a "system of wealth transfers from private citizens to compromised politicians and failed bankers."
In Ireland and Portugal a similar split is emerging.
In the former, a new, hard-left and republican anti-bail-out opposition has sprung seemingly out of nowhere to sit alongside the now defeated Fianna Fail, while potentially in Portugal, a grand coalition is a highly possible option after the current elections, also excluding the 14-20 percent of voters who back similar hard-left anti-bail-out politics.
Likewise, the ideological split in the Finnish parliament and in society is increasingly less between the centre-left and centre-right traditional parties than between those that back the Brussels consensus and those that oppose it.