The Swedish people’s party’s (Sfp) current member of the European parliament Henrik Lax has said that he will not be standing for reelection in next year’s European parliamentary election. Lax, who is 63-years old, justifies his decision to leave the European parliament after one period by saying that he wants more time to relax and take it easy after having spent 40 years in political life, according to the newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet.
Lax was elected to the European parliament in 2004 after Astrid Thors (who nowadays is the minister of migration in the national government and Sfp’s Helsinki MP in the Finnish parliament). He was elected in 14th place out of Finland’s 14 MEP seats. From next year’s election, Finland will lose a place and only have 13 seats available making it all the more difficult for Sfp to be able to obtain elected representation at the EU level.
Lax hopes that there will be a place created for Swedish-speakers in future representation to the European parliament. Åland’s government is already loudly calling for its own separate MEP constituency and Åland’s parliament could vote down the Lisbon treaty if concessions are not made by Helsinki. Lax suggests that one seat reserved for Swedish-speakers could be an alternative saying that there ought to be representation for the language minority.
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Tuesday 8.4.08 at 9:10
Dave the Revelator
Öööömmm… Herr Lax ran for president last election… Had he been elected, would he have just said “this is too tiring, I’d like to retire now,” after a couple years?
Either he was never serious about running for president or the president’s post is lätt som en plätt.
Tuesday 8.4.08 at 15:41
Jonas
Lax has been active in a hundred a one different roles since approximately time’s dawn, so I think it’s fair enough that he wants to retire after this period. He was a member of the riksdag for around 15 years also before going to the EU parliament and he was also chairman of Folktinget for a long time before Wideroos. It’s only sad that he was never a minister in the government, I think he would have been a very good one.
As for Sfp having a candidate in the last presidential election, my judgement would be that it was more down to keeping the party united. Some people argued just that Sfp should back Halonen’s reelection (remember, she was tipped to take it already in the first round) but of course, that would have alienated the centre-right and conservatives in the party. So, having their own candidate gave them someone they could all support and solved that problem.