Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

16th of January 2020, Finnish news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti reported that Mika Niikko and Ville Vähämäki, two members of parliament for the right wing populist Finns Party, had possible ties with the Chinese government that they had not disclosed. Niikko especially has been under scrutiny because of his role as the head of parliaments foreign affairs committee. Despite new developments in the story making the situation worse for the two men, the story has not received enough attention nor has it brought any consequences towards them. This is why I feel responsibility to try and do my part in keeping this story alive. I will apologize in advance about the lack of English language sources. Quite simply, Finnish politics in general do not attract that much international attention. Additionally, most of the reporting by Suomen Kuvalehti, who originally broke the story is behind a paywall. I'll link the English stories some of the Finnish articles here but you have been warned. Li...

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...

I've covered this in my resent posts but now it's official . On the 27th of February 2019, the Finnish parliament voted 153-27 to end the special exception from military service given to Jehovah's Witnesses. This means the current status quo in which total objectors are not convicted is coming to an end. This is of course not a surprise but it's still depressing to see how little our legislators seem to care about human rights. So, what happens next? Well, next the bill has to be signed by the president. Theoretically, the president could just veto it which he wont do, because president Sauli Niinistö (side note: not related to minister of defense Jussi Niinistö) is very much a conscription supporter. Even if he did, the veto would only act as a delay as the parliament can override a presidential veto by voting on a bill a second time. It's been speculated that the bill will take effect as early as the 1st of April or by latest the 1st of May. Until then the statu...

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...