Rerunning for 2021

I did a political campaign for the Helsinki city council in 2017, for Direct Democracy and for better access to Information. On the latter, I proposed to institutionalize all governmental meetings and decisions translated not just into swedish but also to the lingua franca of english for the improvement of democracy (we have a growing 15% of population in Helsinki who speaks neither of both of the official languages, yet they can vote and even be candidates, such as me, how is this a healthy democracy if we have ill informed voters?)

I was an independent candidate under the wing of the Left Alliance. I entered the run quite late. I was invited to do so, and despite being an anarcho-syndicalist, I saw an opportunity to bring in some ideas around demarchy or lottocracy, and its gradual implementation feasibility (we wrote a white paper on this, online here). The invitation to be a candidate had likely been due to my public and active opposition to the Guggenheim Museum and my Research Work of Architectural Democracy.

During the campaign I was forced by YLE's voting machine (Vaalikone) to redo my promotional video into finnish or swedish, not in english. I did so but we of course protested formally. So as far as I know, this ruling has now been changed due to this protest.

I did some talks and debates with other candidates and gave interviews to mostly foreign press, including sputnik, visao and some north american radios. I was excited by some and saddened by many of the candidates. The disappointment was multi-layered, from a poor background knowledge of the history of Representative Democracy, to party dogmas or sneaky political strategies on how to win votes.

I was hoping to have been on the YLE TV debate back then, but sadly another candidate was chosen.

My take is simple, if I am elected, I do not decide, I inform my followers on the topics they need to vote for, and they vote on the app as much as they like, daily or weekly or never! I have been working with the company voteOn in this app, so this is indeed up and running. Whatever people decide, not just every 4 years, but daily, I vote for it. My opinion matters as much as each single voter.

With this work with VoteOn in mind and also because I am finalizing a book on the topic of "The Last Professional Politician", I decided recently to try and continue this process and rerun for 2021. I am right now in the process of choosing which party to be attached to as an independent candidate. Some invitations did come in, so I am now meeting them.