Finnish News Recap, May (1st half): Eurovision and Israel Edition
The European Parliament elections are arriving, and the candidates are already campaigning, though, as is tradition with the European elections, with little enthusiasm. A week ago the *other* consequential European “election” with political ramifications took place, also in Finland. I am, of course, talking about…
EUROVISION AND ISRAEL: Eurovision is the big song contest for European nations (and some others) organized by the European Broadcasting Company every year. You can read this if you want more information about Eurovision or this on why the contest was taken particularly seriously in Finland last year.
Finland’s “No Rules” is a comedy entry by a duo consisting of a largely unknown singer, Henri Piispanen, and only somewhat more known visual artist / DJ Windows95Man. It did not do particularly well, getting to the finals but not even placing there among the ten best. At least it avoided coming in last—that was for Norway’s entry, Gåte, the one I voted for (I’ve been a Gåte listener for over a decade).
What interested people rather more than the Nordic countries was what would happen to Israel – either whether it would end up winning or if the whole contest would or could get canceled because of Israeli participation. As is known, Russia – not a particular fan favorite even before the recent events – was booted out of Eurovision in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. This, then, led to many wondering whether a similar fate would befall Israel after the brutalities in Gaza.
It did not, despite several other Eurovision participants demanding it. The demands for boycott probably spurred many people to vote for the Israeli contestant Eden Golan out of spite—though so did the organized voting campaigns concocted by Israel. Some voters probably did not watch Eurovision, simply reacting to circulating text messages or WhatsApp messages. Finland was a popular vote winner in many countries, including in Finland, though the actual popular favorite was Croatia, also a solid entry.
A large controversy was when Dutch artist Joost Klein, whose song Europapa was an early favorite for a winner and who had taken a strong boycott-Israel stance, was disqualified by murky reasons. Some have said it was because of threatening behavior by Klein due to non-Israel-related reasons, others noted that Klein reacted understandably to Israeli harassment. All of this was not sufficient to win – what won was a reasonably traditional Eurovision ballad by a nonbinary singer from Switzerland, thanks to an extensive and probably coordinated jury vote.
(Why is Israel in the Eurovision in the first place, even though it’s not a geographical part of Europe? It is because Israel’s public broadcaster is a member of the European Broadcasting Union. Most Middle Eastern countries have public broadcasters who are members of EBU, too, so theoretically, many more countries could participate. They’re just choosing not to do so since they couldn’t block Israel from their broadcast, concretely demonstrated by Lebanon in 2005. Also, Australia gets to participate since they really really want to.)
Meanwhile, the college protests in the United States and other countries have spread to Finland, and there’s a small gaggle of tents at my local university, too, but it’ll lead to any major new developments. Finland will probably continue to its standard line of occasionally saying that, though Hamas is also evil Israel should also pipe down, while continuing the usual business relations with Israel, recently demonstrated by abstaining on UN vote on whether the State of Palestine should be recognized.
In other news:
Tarja Cronberg, a former Green Party leader, was stripped of a university honor after it turned out that she had participated in a Russian seminar in Kaliningrad last month. The seminar was ostensibly held to honor Immanuel Kant, but the real purpose was justifying Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cronberg participated as the leader of a peace organization – peace organizations were recently defunded from government contributions, and things like this do not help their cause. Cronberg’s participation was slightly surprising in that it’s not the staunchly liberal and nowadays even Atlanticist Greens usually blamed for being too pro-Russian. Still, she has held similar views for a long time, putting her at odds with many other Greens leaders.
The parliament has finalized its law on limiting political strikes. After weeks and weeks of strikes, it passed with comparatively little notice, signalling the government’s victory over unions, at least for now. However, it’s perhaps one particular factor in the Social Democrats having their support go higher than ever since 2006 in the polls.
One of the government’s populist centerpieces has been alcohol law liberalization, with the first step (raising the alcohol volume limit for drinks sold in convenience stores to 5,5 %) already passed. However, the next step (raising it to 8 %, allowing for mild wines and strong beers to be sold) is experiencing a bump in the road, as the Christian Democrats – particularly their most notable politician Päivi Räsänen, fresh from her free speech trials – are now signalling opposition, not only in the way of voting against it in the parliament (which they’ve been given a special permission to do) but also opposing it in the committee. It is interesting that after being pliable towards absolutely everything else the Christian Democrats, by far the least influential party in this government are choosing this to draw their line.
The Finns Party MP Sebastian Tynkkynen claimed that he was a target of political violence while the Finns were campaigning in Oulu. While there have been some cases of political violence in Finland, it’s unclear what happened; Tynkkynen posted a speeded-up video where some people appeared to be shouting at him (with no sound attached), but it’s unclear whether he was actually under any threat. The Finns Party chair Riikka Purra also told some other counterprotestors to get a job, causing a bit of a stir related to whether this is correct behavior for a Minister.
The Northern Lights, thanks to the recent solar storm, were visible in large parts of the country, though I didn’t manage to spot them.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Windows95man.jpg