PURRA’S SCISSORS: A while ago, Riikka Purra posted a picture of herself flanked by some other Finns Party politicians, holding scissors. Scissors are a fairly traditional (and self-evident) symbol for austerity in Finnish discourse, usually utilized by anti-cuts demonstrators, this way recuperated by Purra herself – leading to a firestorm of criticism, as Purra was accused of not taking the cuts she’s committed to bringing through seriously enough, almost making mockery of the suffering that will surely be inflicted on many people.
Much of what is being targeted is health care. Finland’s newly established “well-being regions” (regions used for organization of health care) have, one after another, announced huge amount of health care station closures, with some of the smaller hospitals also being on the firing line. In many regions, extensive networks covering vast amounts of rural areas are being pared down to locations only being open in central cities, with the rest of the region being served by centers in the larger (i.e. 20 000 or so people) regional towns, central city suburbs, and, eh, “innovative solutions” for the rest of the municipalities.
The one thing that is not targeted for cuts is pensions – the Finns Party might not be quite as dependent on seniors for votes as the “old big” parties, but they also know that much of their middle-aged voter base will soon enough be on pension. The one party daring to suggest such a thing is the Greens, whose latest proposal to pare the pensions down in some undefined way was shot down in flames. Whatever the case, it remains the fact that the fact that the pension system, despite its insolvency, was not reformed in the 90s (as in Sweden) forms one of the reasons why Swedish and Finnish budgets and debt situations differ from each other.
UNION STRUGGLES CONTINUE: There is now a clear tendency in the air that various operators in the Finnish society would want this to end. The Center Party, thus far quite silent and useless in the opposition, has been bolstered by the comparatively successful showing in the presidential election, and has now insistently demanded that the warring parties come to a compromise. Not being in the government, or as connected from the hip to the unions as the left parties are, this is indeed something they are able to do more easily than many other parties. The other opposition parties put up a vote of confidence in Employment Minister Arto Satonen, which he survived easily.
The government issued an offer for the unions to “come to the negotiating table.” The unions, apparently warned in advance that this would have only included an opportunity to sign the proposed anti-union reforms as written, refused – and soon countered by issuing more walkouts. They’ve switched gears, moving from personal transit strikes, which have been directly visible in people’s lives, to the industrial strikes, which have a larger effect on the economy, already feeling the pangs of an oncoming recession (I have recently heard personally many stories about cancelled projects and oncoming pre-firing negotiations).
Which, of course, is the intent, a strike is hardly worth much if it is felt nowhere. The economy has, after all, rarely been moved by Instagram influencers or vegan baristas deciding to go on a strike, as a sector. There have been effect that the industrial strikes, including export industries and transport sector, might affect the fuel supplies, but the unions have stated that this will not be the case. Recently, some signs have been evident that unions and the government might, after all, be willing to negotiate, but we’ll see.
LUTHERAN CHURCH AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland, by far the main denomination in Finland and the closest there is to a “state church” (even if it no longer officially is one – most Finns just refer to it as “The Church”), has long been wracked by division between its liberal and conservative wings. This goes back decades – the original big liberal cause was women in priesthood (achieved in 1988), after that the liberals have pushed for same-sex relationship acceptance, with the cause of the current moment being priests being able to bless same-sex relationships.
Now, even now, at least as far as I see it, the ELCF is tacitly allowing them to be blessed. At least the priests who have been offering such blessings have not been punished, though this is of course still different from formalization. Now, ELFC, or its synod of bishops - has come up with a model which would allow “two views of marriage” to exist in parallel – i.e. that it’s between a man and a woman, and the one that it can also be between two men or two women, to coexist side by side, without much in the way of explanation on how this would, in practice, work in practice. The conservatives don’t like it since they it’s an affirmation of same-sex marriage in principle, the liberals don’t like it since it still offers leeway for conservatives to operate. A typical ELCF compromise, in other words.
The most visible expression of conservative distaste is the country’s most famous conservative Christian, Päivi Räsänen, announcing she is thinking about quitting the ELCF, though it is unclear what denomination she would join. There are a host of other Protestant alternatives, including “free churches” (non-denominational in American terms), Baptists, Adventists and so on, as well as conservative Lutheran splinter denominations. There have recently been stories about newfound interest in Christianity among young men, so it is interesting to see how this trend might be affected.
IN OTHER NEWS, a rare female potential school shooter was arrested after publishing a manifesto with a bit of environmentalism and a lot of high school philosophy nihilism, Left Alliance leader Li Andersson is quitting party leadership in advance to run for European Parliament, and the new Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) head is a Finns Party member.
Image: Fiskars scissors, classic Finnish design. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fiskars-scissors.jpg
How were they able to arrest someone at the stage of publishing a threatening manifesto? Do you know how the laws for that work?