Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

Well, it's been a while since I last posted anything. So, where have I been? Well, apart from school, I recently got a part time job, which has limited my already limited free time even more. I was also sick for a week, which is something that normally doesn't happen to me. So quite simply, I haven't had the time, the energy or the motivation to really focus on writing anything.   That being said, I'm back and as the title suggests, there have been some interesting developments in Finnish politics, which I've been planning to cover for a while. First, let's start with Paavo Väyrynen. You may remember that he was one of the candidates in the recent presidential election, and that in my posts about the election, I gave him some special attention (links at the end).  The reason is pretty much the outcome of the election. Since it was pretty clear from the beginning that president Sauli Niinistö would win re-election, the election lacked that sense of heightened e...

I already had a post planned out and I even began writing it. But before I could finish it, something happened that I simply can't ignore. The thing is that in response to the 2015 refugee crisis, Finland's current government led by prime minister Juha Sipilä has made some questionable changes to our immigration policy, especially when it comes to the treatment of asylum seekers. This has led to a massive increase in the percentage of rejected applications and recently news stories have revealed the dark consequences this has. The worst part is that the government was warned this would happen, but they chose to push through the changes to legislation anyway and has refused to scale back their changes despite heavy criticism from the opposition and groups like Amnesty International. What changes have they made? For one, they made restrictions to the access for legal help for asylum seekers. In court, asylum seekers can't be represented by private law firms, meaning they hav...

The Finnish presidential election was held just two days ago. It resulted to the incumbent Sauli Niinistö being re-elected with 62.7% of the vote, meaning this is the first time with the current voting system that a president was elected during the first round of voting. But, what do the results tell us about the future? The total result is: Sauli Niinistö (Independent) 62.7% Pekka Haavisto (Green League) 12.4% Laura Huhtasaari (Finns Party) 6.9% Paavo Väyrynen (Independent) 6.2% Matti Vanhanen (Center Party) 4.1% Tuula Haatainen (Social Democrats) 3.3% Merja Kyllönen (Left Alliance) 3.0% Nils Torvalds (Swedish National Party) 1.5% Now for one, you might notice that the results are very different than in the poll made by Accuscore that I mentioned in my previous post on the election. Well, first of all, it's actually not a poll, but a prediction and admittedly, I should have taken a closer look on that before my post. Accuscore does not do their own opinion polls, ...

Let's take a look at one of the biggest clusterfucks in Finnish political history: The sote-reform. Since a lot of my visitors here are foreigners, I'll have to do some explaining first. Sote, is an abbreviation used when talking about heath and social services.  It's currently being thrown around a lot because of an effort to reform these fields, in order to combat increasing costs, which puts a lot of pressure on the system. Probably the main reason for this is the aging population, a problem facing large parts of the western world. Because of this, in order to guarantee the same services in the future, plans were devised to curb some of the increasing costs, mainly by simplifying the administration. You see, currently these fields are being controlled on the municipal level. Since individual municipalities are allowed these things themselves, this means there are multiple different ways to handle this, which makes the current system hideously complicated. The main idea...

Okay, I know I promised that I would continue with part two of the conscription debate next, but recent developments in Finnish politics are just something I have to write about. While in Finland we read about American politics on pretty much a daily basis, Finnish politics on the other hand, are rarely talked about abroad. This is a great pity as last summer there was bit of drama when our government nearly fell, because of one the coalition partners elected new leadership. This led to prime minister Juha Sipilä to announce that he would deliver his letter of resignation to the president, but literally at the last minute something happened, which allowed his cabinet to stay intact. Some backstory. In the 2015 parliamentary election, the Center Party won in a pretty spectacular fashion, which led to their leader Juha Sipilä to become prime minister. He then formed a governing coalition with the National Coalition and the Finns Party. The Finns Party had become one of the bigges...