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...

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...

Earlier this year, the youth organization for the National Coalition (referred to as "the organization" from now on) gave a statement, saying that conscription needs to be updated for today's society and that the government should start the process during this election cycle. While one organization giving statements like this might not seem like such a big deal, there are a couple of reasons why this might be significant in the future. For one, making changes to conscription or abolishing it has mostly been an issue talked about by the political left. The National Coalition on the other hand is basically a center-right party, meaning these statements are coming from the other side of the political spectrum. It's also one of the largest parties in the country, currently holding the second highest number of seats in parliament and is one of the three parties forming the governing coalition. Also, this statement is coming from the party's youth organization, essent...

This is a sightly edited version of a post I made to a short lived blog I started back in 2015. It's one of two posts I made on the issue of gun violence and control in America. I decided to re-post both of them here, because of the fact that the situation in America on the issue of gun control is practically the same as it was back in 2015. I think, I've developed a lot as a writer since then, and I think you will notice it. That being said, feel free to enjoy the ramblings of a 18-year-old boy, who was going through some changes in his life and was desperate to went out his frustration.  Link to the other one here First of all, I mean every single word I wrote in my previous post and you won't hear an apology over that. I'm only making this post because the original one didn't really come out like I planned it. Basically, I thought I had enough time to write it, before I had to leave for practice. (I train martial arts that's all you need to know) Orig...

This is a sightly edited version of a post I made to a short lived blog I started back in 2015. It's one of two posts I made on the issue of gun violence and control in America. I decided to re-post both of them here, because of the fact that the situation in America on the issue of gun control is practically the same as it was back in 2015. I think, I've developed a lot as a writer since then, and I think you will notice it. That being said, feel free to enjoy the ramblings of a 18-year-old boy, who was going through some changes in his life and was desperate to went out his frustration. Link to the other post here   As we all know, the US has the highest gun ownership rates in the world. It also has the highest number of homicides and gun related crimes in the developed world. Actually, more Americans have died in gun related accidents and crimes than actual wars. This is not normal! No matter what you say makes this acceptable. This trend could be easily changed, but ev...

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...

On the 2nd of February 2018, large parts of Finnish society will be shutting down. This is because of a protest towards a bill pushed through by the government late last year, which causes some questionable changes to social security, especially towards unemployment benefits. The protest organized by SAK, one of the three central organizations of the Finnish trade unions involves a massive demonstration in Senate Square in Helsinki and a few individual unions going on strike. As a result, building sites, some schools, factories and public transport in many cities will shut down for the day. But, what could cause this kind of a reaction? The reason is the so called "active model" which was pushed through by the government. It's meant to force the unemployed to be more active when looking for a job or have their benefits cut as punishment for failing to fulfill the qualifications. What are those, you might ask. In order to not have cuts made to your benefits, you have ...

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, ...