Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

Well, it wasn't my plan to stay away this long, but since I don't get paid for writing... Well I have more important things to do. That being said, since the Finnish election is only 6 days away I'd say it's time to take a look at recent events. The first thing we have to talk about is the resignation of prime minister Juha Sipilä. On the 8th of March 2019, pretty much exactly a month ago to the hour, from the moment I'm writing this sentence, prime minister Sipilä announced that he would resign because his government couldn't get it's most important piece of legislation through.  Namely, this was the sote-reform, about which I've talked about in an earlier post . Like I mentioned in that post, the governments proposal had encountered numerous problems with the constitution, which meant that the bill had to be revised multiple times and this is why they failed to pass it. The government ran out of time. They tried to the last minute to push this thr...

Let's talk about a legend of Finnish politics: Paavo Väyrynen. The man is one of the longest serving politicians in Finland, having been elected to parliament in 1970, served as a minister in eight governments, a total of 5997 days and held pretty much every political office apart from president and prime minister. He's without a doubt a living legend, however, recently he has done some questionable choices. Now, I've talked about Väyrynen in the past, especially during last years presidential election and later I talked about his exploits in another post . But again in summary: for the longest time, Väyrynen was a member of the Center Party.  He was the party's leader between 1980 and 1990 and until last year was considered the party's honorary chairman. Suddenly in 2016, he announced plans to create his own political party, claiming that the Center Party had gone too far from its roots. The new party called the Citizen's Party made party registry later that...

I've mentioned in my last two posts that 2019 is an election year in Finland. Parliamentary elections are scheduled on the 14th of April and elections for the European Parliament at the end of May and as a result, parties are getting ready to launch their campaigns. One of them is the Blue Reform, which despite being part of prime minister Sipilä's government and holding 17 seats in parliament, is in serious risk of completely dropping out of parliament after the election. How is this possible? I covered this topic in one of my earliest posts , but in summary: the Blue Reform is a splinter group of the Finns Party, which split off after the Finns Party's 2017 convention in which they elected new party leaders. Earlier that year current foreign minister Timo Soini who had led the party since 1997 without any real opposition announced he would not seek another term as party leader. Pretty soon there.were two main candidates for the job: Sampo Terho, widely seen as Soini...

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...

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, ...

I've mentioned in previous posts that Finland is holding it's presidential election on the 28th of January. I've also mentioned that there's a good chance that the incumbent president Sauli Niinistö will actually win in the first round of voting. The actual voting happens in just 5 days, so the question is, has anything changed? Well, for one, the chance of Niinistö winning during the first round is looking less likely. A recent poll made by Accuscore, gives Niinistö 49.2% of the vote. He's still strongly in the lead as the second and third place holders Pekka Haavisto (Green League) and Paavo Väyrynen (independent) hold 13.6% and 13.2% respectively. Basically, the main contest here seems to be for the second place between the two. Now, even if a second round is held, it's pretty clear that Niinistö will still win. Haavisto and Väyrynen both have some facts about them which prevent them getting over 50% of the vote even if it came to that. Haavisto actually ...

Considering that my top two posts in terms of visitors are about Finnish conscription, you probably are already aware that I've made four posts on the topic(links at the end of this one as always). In these posts I've gone through the systems problems, including the human rights violations and the way Finnish lawmakers are blatantly ignoring them, the unnecessarily large number of trained reservists and gone through some of the ideas thrown around by politicians to try and "fix" perceived problems, which would actually make the system even worse. I've also talked about the general hostility towards people like me who advocate for abolishing this system, and mentioned my personal experiences of being a target of personal attacks because of my comments on news articles on the topic and getting blocked on Twitter by our current minister of defense after I questioned his statements on the issue. Even though I've already spent a lot of time talking about this, the ...

On the 28 of January, Finland will be holding it's presidential election. Unfortunately, there is no such sense of heightened emotion compared to to the 2016 election in the US, as the result is pretty clear already. But before going into that, let's take a look at some basics. Presidents are elected to six year terms, with a maximum of two consecutive terms. The winner is determined with popular vote, meaning the candidate with most votes is the winner(unlike in the US). In order to run, you need to be a native Finnish citizen, be nominated by a political party with representation in parliament, or have 20 000 signatures if you want to run as an independent. The elections have two rounds. During the first round all candidates are against each other and if none of them get over 50% of the vote, the two candidates with the most votes will run against one another in the second round two weeks later. What does the Finnish president do? Well, he mostly acts as a figurehead. Whi...