Finland Times

The ruling party has suffered a quick fall in the opinion polls since the election of Alexander Stubb as Premier and Chairman of the party in June.

Still the biggest party in late July, the ruling party fell to number two after the opposition Centre Party in a poll by a Finnish language newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in October. The conservatives got 19.4 percent backing and the  Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party)  22.3 percent.

The poll may deal a heavy blow to the party with the general elections only five months away.

Branded as "right of centre" during the ten years under the previous chairman Jyrki Katainen, the National Coalition Party has recently taken stands that indicate a shift to the right. A newly strengthened conservative line of supporting private interests in an upcoming health and social care reform surprised others.

Both the government and opposition parties reached an agreement earlier this year on a health and social services reform, but the conservatives started to hesitate and said the reform as envisaged would be against the interest of the private health care sector.

Timo Soikkanen, a professor of political history at Turku University, believed the conservatives are taking risk of alienating their lower middle class voters.

He told Xinhua that the Finnish conservative party has not been internally very unified, but rather a combination of traditional conservatives with a religious tone, social reformists and of late increasingly also of libertarians. "Internal agreement has been easiest on pro-business economic policies, but the rest has been more difficult," said Soikkanen.

Soikkanen noted the conservatives would have great political difficulty in weakening the welfare state.

Veteran analyst Matti Laitinen, who has studied the conservatives since 1970s, told Xinhua the conservatives had been able to establish themselves representatives of "socially responsible" market economy. "But now the line has become unclear, the position of market liberals has strengthened and hard market economy is also talked about as a part of the future in Finland."

A series of public relations blunders have also worsened the image of the party.

The Minister for Social Affairs Laura Raty had claimed in public that only relatively few Finns earned as little as 2100 euros a month. Local media quickly revealed that half a million wage earners (out of the 2.5 million work force) in Finland get that or less. The minister apologized, but had difficulty in damage control.

Media also found out that the minister had during her practice as a private doctor channeled income through a company structure and saved in taxes. The system had been completely legal, but was deemed morally wrong.

The impact was enhanced by the fact that many of the key private operators on the Finnish health care sector are owned by foreign capital investors and have been able to reduce their Finnish taxation through international transfers, despite having benefited from Finnish public health contributions.

In another blunder, a conservative Member of Parliament criticized the public funding of high quality perambulators to immigrant families.

Late last month a conservative Youth League executive was arrested and admitted having killed a woman of immigrant background. The manslaughter had no political connotation, but the Youth League had earlier got negative publicity due to its hard right line on social policy and immigration.