Now that the centre-right government of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä is halfway through its four year term, the newspaper syndicate Uutissuomalainen decided it was time for a report card. The media group approached eight prominent think tanks in Finland and asked them to evaluate the coalition's performance. The school grading system in Finland progresses from a failing grade of 4 to an excellent 10. Sipilä's team received an average grade of just 6.4 on this scale.
The research institutes surveyed agreed that the current government's worst failures to date were cuts to education and the planned health and social care reform.
"The government's overhaul of health and social services has spiralled completely out of control. It's growing clearer that the government will not achieve its proposed reform objectives," says Mattias Fagerholm, head of the policy institute Agenda.
The Visio think tank and the Kalevi Sorsa Foundation, on the other hand, gave the government praise for successfully fostering a tripartite competitive pact that lowered unit labour costs.
Uutissuomalainen is a media group made up of eight newspapers, the largest of which are Keskisuomalainen out of Jyväskylä and Etelä-Suomen Sanomat, a daily published in Lahti.