Helvetin Pastori/Pastor of Hell

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...