Re-writing history

A funny thing happened in my corner of the world lately.

Finland will have a presidential election in January 2006. The funny thing is that the right-wing conservative presidential candidate in a campaign starting event declared himself to be in defence of the "workers", which he classified as all people (including multimillionary CEO's that make more money when they fire the "other" workers [Helsingin Sanomat, 27/10/2005, 4/11/2005]).

This being the beggining of the campaign you can expect the candidates to still be trying to get the "hang" of the themes that will shape the campaign, on the other hand what the right-wing candidate is trying to do is pretty unheard of.

I mean we do have guys like Blair and Schröeder coming from the left and trying to go more to the center in order to get more right-wing votes, but this is the first time that hear of a right-wing candidate trying to get more votes from the hard-core left!

Why this happened we can only speculate, but one reason may be that because Tarja Halonen (the incumbent with about 58% vote intentions in the latest poll) is a person that has the trust of the left and pretty much of the center the only option to avoid Tarja's victory is to hijack her campaign themes.

By hijacking the campaign theme of "defending workers" the right-wing candidate tries to set himself apart from the third candidate (Center-right and current prime minister) and sets his only opponent to be the incumbent president.

As far as political strategies go this is not too difficult to follow. But the amazing circumstance - and harder to explain - is that he is trying to re-write history by turning Marx's theory on it's head.

Marx stated:
- there is a class strugle
- history is played out as a class strugle of those that don't have the wealth trying to obtain the wealth that has been "abused" by the rulling classes and the Bourgois at that time.

What our right-wing candidate is trying to say is:
- there is no class strugle
- history is not played as a class strugle because there are no classes anymore.

Of course there will not be many Doctoral thesis written on this subject, but the fact that a political candidate is trying to turn history on it's head to win a presidential election begs the question: Why is he doing this?

Can it be only to win an election (in which case he would forget about this outrageous claim after the election and go about his business).
Can it be a more profound reason: like really tring to hijack the political space on the center-left?

Beats me, but one thing is for sure: Marx must be turning in his grave (as so will the dead right-wing politicians in this small country called Finland! :)