UPDATE 15:37: A couple of hours ago the parliament voted to not improve democracy, and dropped the 0,5% proposal.

The Finnish Parliament is now handling the party law reform. Democracy is being desecrated by every single parliamentary party: First by the Constitutional Committee, which had proposed unanimously to reject the proposal of amending the government bill of the party law reform; Now MPs are claiming that the government proposal would have a positive impact on democracy supporting the parties without seats in the government, which is factually not the case. Even the Constitutional Law Committee's report confirms this, but it still won't support the proposal that would actually have a positive impact on democracy, and what would actually achieve the effect that the bill claims to aim at.

OSCE issued a note to Finland in 2011. They said that not giving party support for parties outside the parliament likely hinders the democratic debate and diversity.

I read the Constitutional Law Committee's report, and it proved to be nothing short of a joke, pointing to the parliament's contempt for experts, democracy and the OSCE position.

The government proposal would allow the parties outside the parliament to get party support if they passed a treshold of 2% in the last parliamentary elections. A counter proposal was made, however, offering a threshold of 0.5%.

Fixing democracy deficit with the proposal of 2% treshold for funding is like curing cancer with sugar pills. Government noted that the OSCE has provided a note for them, and the government is going through the motions, but is not actually willing to change the status quo. In practice, there is a very minuscule chance to not get to the parliament if party gets over 2% of the votes . The last time it happened was in 1962 when with a vote tally of 2,16%. At least one seat has been won with less than 2% of the vote in every election between 1983 to 2003 with the exception of the 1987 election. We can conclude that nothing will change, but they want to be able to say they have improved democracy (they actually already stated the 2% treshold would do that). This is outrageous, as the Committee has claimed they want to improve the funding for parties that don't get enough votes for seats.

The Constitutional Law Committee acknowledges this lack of effect in its report, as well as admitting that the experts are in favor of 0.5% of the voting threshold for party support as opposed to 2%. The only somehow positive thing the report says about the 2% threshold is as follows: "Although the change in the party law under the government's proposal may in practice have little effect, the committee considers it to be fundamentally important in terms of promoting democratic debate and diversity."

Nobody is even pretending that 2% would be any better than 0.5%. The government's original proposal states that "the amendment would improve the working conditions of parties without parliamentary seats and in that way supports the diversity of political debate." Now the Committee says it supports democratic debate and diversity even if it doesn't actually improve the situation for the parties without seats. I'm asking how exactly does that happen?

They do, of course, give a reason for the rejection of the proposal with the 0.5% vote limit.

"The bill "LA 27/2015 vp" proposal of party support distribution method is substantially different to the government bill, so the Committee will propose the rejection of the bill."

It is substantially different when the entire point of the proposal is that the current way of sharing party support is bad for democracy!

The differences of the government bill, and the other one is as follows:

Government:

- 2% threshold to receive party support.

- Money is divided to the parties based on parliamentary seats, if party has any.

- If a party does not have seats, it would get money for one-third of the percentage of votes, so that 2% of the votes received gives only 0.66% of total party support for the outside party.

Only the proposal:

- 0.5% threshold to receive party support

- Money is divided completely based on votes, even if the party has seats. (This is more democratic, as it respects the will of the nation instead of the voting system)

Reduction of the threshold to at least half a per cent is well justified, as the Committee claimed, the aim is to improve the position of parties without seats, and 2% threshold wouldn't do anything, but the 0.5% threshold would give funding for at least one of parties outside the parliament, the Pirate Party Finland. PPFI itself supports reilumpi.puoluetuki.fi campaign with 5000 votes treshold (was proposed to last parliament, sadly not to this one), which would give funding for other parties without seats too.

Changing the distribution method from the seats to according to the votes is well justified, as the seats do not often represent the number of votes too well, so the larger parties tend to get more seats than is proportional to the votes.

It's not even relevant to discuss wheter or not it's justified that a party without seats would get less support than the percentage of the votes would provide. It's irrelevant because there is very little chance of any party without votes getting any support with 2% treshold. In the report, this isn't even mentioned outside the written law proposal, they don't even try to justify it.