"Who else could be blamed, other than the government? I really can't tell," said Tuomo Martikainen, a leading political commentator and professor of political science at Helsinki University.
"Considering the growth of the Finnish economy, it is amazing that the unemployment figures are so high," Martikainen said, referring to the robust growth rates the Finnish economy has seen over the past eight years.
Unemployment, which affected 3.2 percent of the workforce in 1990, soared to 17 percent during a Finnish recession in the early 1990s.
Since then, a left-right coalition government headed by Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, in power for nine years, has aimed to keep it below 10 percent.
But in May, the jobless rate jumped to 11.9 percent, or 323,000 people, according to Statistics Finland. Among the unemployed were 125,000 students who had not found a job for the summer, the agency said.
Despite the recent technology boom and Finland's economy being named the most competitive in the world by the Swiss-based World Economic Forum, Finnish companies are dismissing workers and moving their operations abroad in droves.
In 2001 the Finnish manufacturing sector cut its work force by 2 percent, to 447,900, but boosted its personnel abroad by 12 percent, to 225,000, the Confederation of Trade and Industry has estimated.
"If you take the Nordic situation as a whole, Finland is getting on well except for unemployment, which is long behind. There must be an explanation, it must be the government policy that has failed," Martikainen said.
In 2000, the official unemployment rate in Finland was 9.8 percent.
By comparison, the rate in neighboring Sweden was 4.7 percent, 3.4 in Norway and 5.5 in Denmark.
Martikainen blamed the high unemployment rate on the close ties between the labor unions, the governing parties of the Social Democrats and the Left Alliance, which has prevented reform of the labor market.
"The labor unions are much more interested in trying to keep their own people employed and couldn't care less about the unemployed," he said.
"And the Social Democratic Party is dependent on the labor unions, but the labor unions are not willing to take care of the unemployed.
It simply is not in their interest to reform the labor market," he said.
Former prime minister and opposition leader Esko Aho says that unemployment costs the Finnish state 8 billion euros ($7.58 billion) each year - the same amount it cost to bail out Finland's banks after a banking crisis in the 1990s.
"Why hasn't someone been blamed for the fact that we every year pay as much for unemployment as for the bank crisis," Aho thundered in his farewell speech as head of the Center Party at the weekend.
He said it was "unnecessary to dream about" saving the welfare state, and income tax cuts yearned for by Finnish employers and employees, until the jobless rate was tackled.
A week ago the International Monetary Fund also warned the government that it would not be able to maintain its lavish welfare system if it were unable to bring down unemployment, especially in view of the ageing population.
"Finland needs to increase the rate of employment, and with it the rate of economic growth," said Robert Feldman, head of an IMF team of economists who carried out the annual assessment of the Finnish economy.
"Without increasing the rate of employment, there will simply be too few workers to support a growing number of pensioners," Feldman warned.
The IMF estimated the jobless rate might be as high as 18 percent, when labor market programs to combat unemployment were included in the statistics.
The high unemployment rate is set to be one of the main themes of the upcoming campaign for Finnish legislative elections in March 2003.
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