Centre Party chair Juha Sipilä said that he’s disappointed that government’s proposal for large-scale social and health care reform will be left to the incoming government to pursue.
Juha Sipilä’s Centre Party currently leads public opinion polls, leading political pundits to wager he’s likely to lead Finland’s post-election government – this would make the still-born reform package his headache instead of someone else’s.
On Thursday Parliament’s Constitutional Law Committee recommended deferring implementation of the massive reform programme to the next administration.
Sipilä surmised that the country’s credit rating could take a hit because the important structural reform package remained only a theory.
“There is a great danger that our credit rating could fall,” Sipilä said Thursday afternoon after the Constitutional Law Committee dropped its bombshell.
The election frontrunner remarked however that there was much to be learned from the programme.
“We have to review the entire process critically. Did the expert contributions come at the right time during the different stages?” he queried.
He admitted that responsibility for the failed reform also lay with the opposition.
“We were all trying to get this done together. Of course the government was the main driver,” he pointed out.
Sipilä said it was important to get the country’s major structural reforms off the ground. He noted that there were now two options for advancing the social and health care package: continue with the current mechanism of joint municipal bodies or develop a region-based model.
“We have to get this done,” he said.
Stubb: No need for panic
Prime Minister Alexander Stubb meanwhile called for cool heads following the Committee’s decision.
“At a suitable time I will gather party leaders for follow-up discussions on how to move the reform forward, like I did last time,” Stubb said in a statement.
He said he believed that it was possible to find political consensus on how to move forward.
“In that respect it must also be foolproof, so that there is no conflict with the constitution and with the Constitutional Law Committee,” he remarked.
“We will find a solution, it just seems to be taking a long time,” he added.
The PM said that while he was upset that the reform package had to be deferred to the next government, the preparation work done so far would not be wasted.
“The work done by the government, the Parliamentary working groups and the Parliament will carry over to the next government,” he noted.
He pointed out that all of the political parties were committed to social and health care reform and its goals.
“Social and health care reform is important for safeguarding Finnish services,” he concluded.