PRESIDENT AALTOLA: After weeks - months, even - of teasing an announcement, Mika Aaltola, the chair of The Finnish Institute of International Affairs (Finland’s preeminent foreign policy think tank), formally announced he is running for presidency as an independent candidate. His campaign will have to collect 20 000 signatures to support his candidacy, though this should not cause major problems.
Aaltola, often featured in magazines as an expert even before February 2022, became a familiar figure to absolutely everyone last year as the nation’s pre-eminent “voice to trust” on war, Russia and foreign policy matters. As the Russian invasion instantly and for good turned the nation’s interest from matters pandemic to matters war, he gracefully took the mantle of “crisis expert” from various “Covid czars”.
Aaltola has achieved his expert status partly by the force of his manly looks and mainly by his habit of carefully enunciating the past events of the last few weeks and months in a way that gives the impression he’s saying something profound or taking a stance on what will happen in the conflict, even when he isn’t. The stances he does take hew to Finland’s official foreign policy line – strongly pro-NATO, anti-Russia, and pro-Ukraine.
His expertise was rapidly parlayed into hopes (particularly among center-right circles) that he would become a political figure. After consideration he refused to become a parliamentary candidate, but as the presidency is the chief foreign policy role in the country, its call has apparently been harder to refuse.
Still, this announcement for presidency has aroused mockery, as Aaltola has committed one of the cardinal sins in Finnish politics, pridefulness – openly saying that he considers himself better than all the other candidates and that what separates him from the others is that he defends Finland’s interests. Of course a lot of political types are against him simply from coming (somewhat) outside of Finland’s small, cozy political circle, where most all already are friends or at least frenemies with each other.
Now that he has become a political figure, he will almost certainly have to take political stances on matters other than foreign policy, which he has thus far avoided. Some liberals have already questioned his decision to speak at an event organized by SLEY, a conservative religious movement within the Lutheran church that opposes female priesthood and gay marriage, through other politicians not sharing these goals have also spoken at SLEY events.
In any case, while Aaltola has a fair number of supporters, he’s still a wild card. A nonpolitical figure going into politics, let alone a high job like this, always contains risks – like the risk of him coming out with a statement or an action so outlandish that his candidacy crashes and burns then and there, or a scandal going out.
FUR FARM PANDEMIC CLOSURES: For some weeks now, Finland has been facing a potential pandemic situation that has aroused global interest. The H5N1 avian flu has been ravaging the poultry farms in Finland, but has also spread through fur farms, which are now a focal point of controversy.
Before COVID, H5N1 was considered the prime candidate for a virus that might cause a globally fatal pandemic, as its mortality in humans, in the few cases where it has spread from animals to humans, has been around 20-50 %. However, thus far, there has been no evidence of mutations that would lead to easy, consistent human-to-human transition. This is still not impossible, which of course heightens pandemic-related fears, particularly after COVID.
All this has once again inflamed one of the most perennial animal rights/welfare topics in Finland – the debate on whether fur farms should be closed for good. This has been heightened by calls from global experts to consider this a new perspective to ban fur farming. 50 000 minks and foxes have already been culled at three different farms.
Unlike with food production – the poultry farms, say – the sector cannot justify itself by its contribution to food security, always an important issue for a small Northern nation without a lot of good or even decent farmland. Of course, many people consider fur farming to be a morally deeply deficient field, an effort to kill masses of animals for what is today mainly seen is a vanity product.
Animal rights have had a strong standing in the Finnish environmental/progressive movement for a long time and closing the fur farms has been a top issue for the movement. Finland is, indeed, one of the few remaining countries in Europe where fur farming continues to be anything resembling an important sector – not a particularly important one nationally, but with a presence in certain electorally important regions for various parties.
Nevertheless, Sanna Marin’s center-left government took no steps towards abolishing fur farming, and this government is likely to follow the same course. In this issue even the Swedish People’s Party – usually the most progressive party in this right-wing government - agrees, as fur farming happens to be a particularly important profession in the Swedish-speaking west coast of Finland, one of SPP’s most important areas. Hesitation might also be caused by memories of Denmark’s COVID-era mink cull, probably a large reason for why the local center-left government was eventually turfed and replaced with a more centrist one.
All this might still be changed if there’s considered to be too much of a risk of an actual human-to-human transmissible variant found, and if it starts spreading – if not for other reasons than simply because Finns would consider it to be embarrassing to have a globally fatal pandemic associated with Finland.
In other news, the opposition Social Democrats are rising heavily in the polling due to the government’s scandals, violent videos of kids getting beaten up in schools and other such places spread in social media, and American conservatives are raising money for Christian Democratic MP Päivi Räsänen, whose lawsuit ordeal for comments on homosexuality continues.
Image: Minks at a fur farm. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fur_farming_in_Finland#/media/File:Minkkej%C3%A4_pes%C3%A4kolossa.jpg