Eight weeks have gone by since the big “jytky”. The parliamentary election results shocked many people both in Finland and abroad, and the so far unsuccessful process of forming a government has been if not shocking surprising at least. The republic is still without a government.

The main problem in forming a government and its program seems to be a lack of trust between the political parties, especially between the National Coalition and the Social Democrats.  Mikael Jungner, party secretary of the Social Democrats, stated that the relationship between his party and the National Coalition had hit an “ice age” during the program negotiations and that it would take a long time for relations to return to normal. Yes, melting the ice, aka building trust, may last even longer than Jungner imagines: the nature of trust is fragile, it is difficult to initiate, slow to grow and easy to break.

So what is actually the role of trust between these two parties or any parties what so ever? First, trust is a social phenomenon which makes organizations function better and cooperate more fluently. Secondly, there is a strong connection between almost any human interaction and trust; effective communication, learning and problem-solving all require trust. Trust provides the conditions under which certain outcomes, not only cooperation but also higher performance, are likely to occur. And finally, trust has been identified as a critical part for partnership formation and for the future success of cooperative ventures.

Debate and collective decision making require interaction. However, in political parties the way interaction is realized depends on matters like organization culture and other process-specific factors. Interaction is also influenced by the individuals who are participating on the decision making. The distribution of work between political actors, the level of authority and situational sensitivity influence on the interaction between actors: Interaction is not about taking all the actors into account equally, balanced cooperation or flow of information.

In other words, people are more likely to accommodate others’ views and preferences, when they trust each other. It seems that accommodating or compromising were not the key words during the first round of Finnish government negotiations. It is hard to say, whether lessons were learnt by any of the political actors: Is there enough courage and will to settle and compromise during the next round of the negotiations?!

The new political ice age would truly freeze the creativity needed during the next government period, for example in navigating in the current economic situation. Dear political leaders, please hear me out: By acting together you can achieve bigger goals, ones that cannot be attained individually. Finland needs a government.

Trust arises from our dependency on other people. People cannot survive on their own; we need each other.

Katariina Salmisalo
Project Consultant