English-language discussions and news relating to Finland and the Finnish culture.
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On behalf on the majority that did not vote for this government, I want to apologize. We are not happy either and will try to do better next time.
Meanwhile enjoy this preview picture of a Fazer chocolate chocolate bar with custom text on it. I can not afford to actually send you one.
There's a sad trend of talking right-left here. There is no economic right involved.
The main parties are the actual nationalist socialist party, crony capitalists, and very anti-Christian "Christian democratic" party.
The first one is completely incompetent idiots with all the usual ethno nationalist ideals. Which means the whole thing is an implosion with small steps towards a dystopic disaster waiting to happen. Hopefully the first will come soon so there won't be much of the latter.
I'm American. We're notoriously uniformed about the rest of the world. Can you explain what's happening, please?
Strongly caricatured answer:
Current parliament in Finland is leaning heavily right related to previous ones. Which in American context would mean roughly that our political field is centrist, leaning slightly to the left, as your system is way more broken than ours (of course I'm looking things from this side of the pond so I might be biased about this).
The biggest party Kokoomus is traditonally aligned with corporates and free markets with less concern about worker rights and other 'soft' values. The second is Perussuomalaiset who gained support by promising to cut immigration, lower fuel prices and a lot of other mostly populist and 'cheap' anecdotes without a lot of actual means to achieve their goals.
The smaller parties included are Kristillisdemokraatit who don't seem to care much about anything else than the Bible and their interpretation of it and Swedish national party who seem to only care about rights of swedish speaking people and their language in Finland.
Some portion of the people seem to think that the current coalition will end free health care and education, destroy worker rights and unions and cripple our society which is known to take care of the poor people and those who can't take care of themselves.
The truth is most likely somewhere in between. Our political system doesn't give absolute power to anyone for multiple reasons and the leftist parties still have their ~30% of our parliament, so even if some of the more extreme changes would come to the table as is they would most likely be diluted at least somewhat before they come into reality.
I personally would have liked a different composition for our parliament after the covid and start of Ukrainian war, but I don't think it'll be a complete disaster either.
Yeah, I'm not so worried the actual policies they are trying to make. The opposition is strong and the goverment parties are in a really forced alliance with a lot of disagreement.
This post was mostly just about the public embarrassments, NCP whining they are not allowed as an official partner of Pride when some of their representatives just voted against the trans rights bill, Finns failing to find representable office holders amongst them and Christian Democrats just doing what they always do, that just keep coming.
The Swedish People's Party is just happy to be included and will work with anyone for a spot in the government. While having a reputation of only pushing the swedish language, they are actually competent and the current Minister of Education has been the longest-serving Minister of Justice.
It sounds like your right is probably our center, as you're concerned about losing free health care and education. Our student loans are out of control and health insurance can be anywhere between $0 and $1000 per month depending on your employer and the plan. My son is trying to pay off a $5k appendectomy because he didn't have insurance.
Our healthcare is in serious problems due to population in general aging and birth rate decline year after a year, but even the most right wing of bigger parties don't want to shut it down completely. There's a view that commercial providers would do the same job cheaper and more efficiently, but in history that kind of movement hasn't really provided an solution. The private companies just take the easy and fast cases and leave the expensive ones for the society to deal with (caricatures again). It's not (in my opinion) a really viable solution, even if the private sector could help in some cases, like with health care provided by employees, and even then there's edge cases and gray area which needs regulation and rules.
Education and long term success of our country is a whole another matter. Currently (in my very own opinion) our education system has major problems and they need to be addressed as soon as possible, but resolving that needs some sort of soft values and cold hard cash. In a current global situation that's a difficult problem to manage and as a problem it's one of the easier ones to push into the future, regardless of the reality that it hurts much more in the long run to let the education quality to suffer.
Stripped to it's guts and simplified to the max the main problem is that we have too many old people to take care of and too few births to keep up with the demand for the workforce. It's estimated (by others, there's also different estimates) that in the next 5-10 years up to 40% of our working people will retire and there's nowhere near enough people to replace them, specially educated ones. And the people who will replace the retired are young, unexperienced and unfit for the workforce due to social media culture and whatnot.
There's no easy answers and the current parliament is built with people who give more weight for the corporations and money than labor rights and socialism (democratic variant of that, not the kind we used to have at east). As I mentioned, I personally would've preferred for us to have a bit more left leaning government, since people have suffered a lot with global issues lately and recovering from that will take both time and resources. But at the same time I understand that we can't just loan more money indefinetly and that corrections are both necessary and painful.
In the end it's just a matter of how to balance things. On a left-right axis I personally would like to see a bit more left leaning politics since I still try to believe that people will actually do their best for their society, but the parliament we chose on elections is leaning more on the right. Future will show how that goes, but I don't think we'll see anything as extreme as USA seems to have their hands in.
The last election resulted a very right wing majority, so they are planning a lot of restrictions on immigration and wellfare and have been outspoken against LGBT rights.
The latest turn was Minister of Economic Affairs being forced to resign in a record time because all the times he had been flirting with actual nazi groups started being brought up.
Some other members of his party have been seemingly sincerely suggesting limiting press freedom after that.
The guy chosen to follow him just Monday posted some tweets about a journalist that were deemed as harassment. This isn't his first time being accused of harassment.
To be fair National Coalition is mostly just an economically conservative party and socially at least somewhat progressive, but they had to get in bed with the nationalist Finns party and christian democrats to form a majority government. So now they are in a situation where they have to support their allies as a whole even though some of their elected members really diagree with them.
A really scary thing is occurring here - in some areas Trumpsters are running for local school boards and winning. Then they throw out books that mention racial or LGBTQ issues and get rid of teachers who speak out.
In short: The new government is alarmingly right-winged. Some have been accused of being nazi sympathisers. Also as a new thing we have conspiracy theories that some high government officials believe in. Oh and they want to dial back on useless money draining things such as social security (e.g. monetary help) So a bit like what you guys have there!
I'm sorry for you. It's hard to see your government taken over by hateful horrible people and it makes you feel so frustrated and disconnected. It's exhausting! Majority or not, sometimes the loudest asshole wins and becomes the face of your nation.