Finnish News Recap, week 29: Rhodes Climate Tourist edition
CLIMATE CHANGE TOURISM: Finland has experienced a weather pattern reminiscent of some of the past years; hot June, a fairly chilly July and (at least according to forecasts) a hot August. The temperatures for the last few weeks have been around 15–25 °C – a perfectly suitable weather for most of our cold-blooded citizens – though it has also been frequently a bit too rainy for my taste.
Thus, we have been spared the direct effects of the Southern European heatwave ravaging various countries (like Portugal, where Finnish firefighters have been sent to combat forest fires). However, this has not applied to Finnish tourists who, alongside tourists from various other countries, have been vacationing in the South – notably in the island of Rhodes, now suffering from wildfires.
Naturally, the trials of the tourists amidst the destruction have drawn scorn from the more climate-change-conscious sectors of the society. Many of the supposed visitors have now cancelled their trips, and even more scorn has fallen on those taking up cheap flights to do some disaster tourism in the stead of the cancellers. The whole discourse on the tourists instead of everyone else suffering from these effects is fairly myopic, but that’s just par for the course.
The wildfires, and the dire climate graphs about broken climate records from abroad, have given the climate debate a new boost. The new government’s programme continues to commit to the previous government’s target of carbon neutrality by 2035, but it is unclear whether their proposed measures will actually deliver this. Left-wing opposition politicians, meanwhile, are under fire for participating in the local version of Amazing Race, which – of course – means they’ll have to fly around the world. A
ANTI-GOVT PROTESTS: The racism scandal has been treading water for some time now. There was a large piece on Iltalehti, a popular tabloid, which went through all of Riikka Purra’s forum posts from 2008, but since some sort of a error had been made on who had said what comment at what part the whole story ended up eventually being retracted. That has visibly put a bit of a kibosh on media reporting, as has Minister Wille Rydman’s defamation lawsuit against the country’s newspaper of note Helsingin Sanomat for reporting on his claimed grooming scandal.
Still, the last week saw some particularly visible protests against the new government. Approx. 3000-5000 people marched through Helsinki to protest the new government’s minister’s racism scandal (discussed by me here, for example), a good-sized protest for Finland, especially one convened on a relatively short notice. Meanwhile, a smaller protest of the “poor and sick” convened approximately 300 protestors on the stairs of the parliament, in protest of the many planned cuts falling on the poorest members of the society as a part of the government’s general austerity policy.
In non-street-level actions, 121 000 people signed a petition for Riikka Purra to resign for the blog comments scandal and this was handed to opposition politicians. Even the business class, traditionally close to the National Coalition, the government’s leading party, has criticized the new government for not being committed to labor-based immigration.
Nevertheless, the government’s situation seems at least a bit less precarious than before. The Swedish People’s Party, certainly the most anti-right-wing-populist party in the government and the weakest link for its survival, just mainly seems to be keeping mum and repeating that its position is same as always (whatever that is!), and the other parties mostly seem to be setting into a similar pattern.
In other news, the satanic Neo-Nazi potential terrorists caught by the police recently were shown to have created 3D printed guns for planned potential terror, and H5N1 avian flu is ravaging Finland’s chicken and bird stocks.
Image: Climate protests during the governmental negotiatons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hallitusneuvottelut_2023_2023-05-02.jpg