On Friday morning, opposition parties submitted a request to Speaker of Parliament Jussi Halla-aho (Finns) to suspend Parliament's summer recess. Halla-aho said at the time that he would consider the matter.
However, in a statement published on Saturday, Halla-aho said that he did not see the need to convene Parliament.
"The opposition groups' request is, in my interpretation, related to comments written by one of the ministers years earlier on her blog and on an online discussion board, and to the public debate that is now taking place about them. In my view, the urgency and social significance of the matter are not comparable to the reasons why Parliament has been convened during a recess in the past," Halla-aho said.
Halla-aho also justified his decision by the fact that, even in previous cases, the suspension of a parliamentary recess is a very rare measure.
"The threshold is high," he wrote on Twitter.
According to the information available to the Speaker, Parliament has never been convened during a recess on the initiative of the opposition.
Halla-aho previously said he would reconvene Parliament if a majority were in favour. With the Swedish People's Party announcing on Friday night that they would not join the opposition's request to end the summer recess.
"Speaker cannot bow to external pressure"
Speaker Halla-aho said that opposition groups did not even try to advance the issue by approaching him directly, but made their demands through traditional and social media.
He wrote about this already on Thursday in his Twitter thread, stating that Twitter and the media are not appropriate channels of communication in this regard.
Halla-aho said that he interprets the intention as being to create a conflict of authority with the Speaker and thus to use the pressure of publicity to guide his decision-making.
"The Speaker cannot bow to external pressure because he represents Parliament and defends its independence," Halla-aho added.
Opposition's demand motivated by reputational damage
The opposition justified its request due to the damage to Finland's international reputation. The letter mentioned, among other things, that since the debate on the government programme, a wealth of new information has become available which was not available in June when the vote of confidence in the government was taken.
Most recently, the debate has been sparked by racist online comments by Finance Minister Riikka Purra (Finns), comments which were submitted to the guestbook of Halla-aho's Scripta blog.
However, Halla-aho said that his decision to refuse to convene Parliament was influenced by precedents, general parliamentary procedures and his own assessment of the urgency and importance of the issue behind the request.
