Finnish News Recap, week 36: Tony Blair Institute edition

SANNA’S NEW JOB: The last week’s big story was the announcement by Finland’s former PM, international celebrity Sanna Marin, of getting a new job abroad. More specifically, a new job at Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, or just Tony Blair Institute. This required a formal release from the MP’s task by the parliament, which was duly granted to her.

Of course, this has raised several questions, such as “what the heck is the Tony Blair Institute”? Everyone in Finland still knows who Tony Blair is, of course. He represented the same Third Wave tendency that took over the social-democratic parties world over in the 1990s, including in Finland. In other words, he encapsulates their formal move from socialism, in the sense of public ownership over means of production, to managerial capitalism.

Still, even more so than that, people – Millennials, at least – probably still more associate Tony Blair with the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and deposition of Saddam Hussein, flagrantly breaking international law and exchanging Saddam’s tyranny to decades of chaos. Finland did not participate in Iraq War, and even the possibility of this happening under Paavo Lipponen, Finland’s Blairite 90s and early 00s Prime Minister, was enough to lead to a huge scandal during the 2003 election and its aftermath. Almost all Finns, particularly now, would find this non-participation to be a good thing.

As such, considering Marin’s progressive image, many have wondered about the selection of this line of work – though one of the probable reasons is simply that TBI was originally established in the aftermath of Brexit to oppose it and other similar expressions of Euroscepticism and Marin has always been a committed Europeanist. Still, that doesn’t answer the questions around, for instance, TBI’s connections to the brutal Saudi regime.

Probably even more criticism, though, was aroused simply due to Marin getting a plush international job immediately after she had said, in the Social Democrat convention, that she was going to stay in Finnish politics. Of course, one might say that after her PM’s role there’s little left to do in national politics and that the international route is the only one to take. Whatever one might argue, Marin is probably still going to remain a figure of interest in Finland – if not for other reasons than for her tendency to live rent-free in the head of her biggest detractors.

GOVERNMENT SURVIVES: After months of dwelling on the antiracism scandal, the government’s make-or-break moment finally came, as the parliament voted on two votes of confidence against the Finns Party’s ministers. It had been widely predicted that if these votes failed, due to a government party (i.e., the Swedish People’s Party, the most liberal party in the government) voting against, the government would fall.

Well, anticlimactically, the government survived the votes. The Swedish People’s Party, and other government parties, held ranks and voted for confidence, apart from one MP from SPP (Eva Biaudet, the biggest internal government critic in the party), who voted present. The Finns Party demanded SPP to punish Biaudet for this slippage, though the party seems to be reticent to do so, while the opposition has condemned her for selling her values. Voting present on important issues like this rarely brings one new friends.

Most opposition parties voted against the government and the ministers, though the Center Party – which, as the name says, endeavors to be in the center, apparently including on matters like this – voted mostly present.

All in all, there’s little more to say about this. The SPP has indicated that it won’t make any more waves, at least unless something radical happens (and, really, what would be more radical, unless it was something like it somehow turning out that the Finns Party had literal daily contacts to would-be Nazi terrorists, whose case is going to court?)

Nevertheless, the vote was followed by numerous demonstrations against racism and the government in various cities, though there’s also a palpable shift in opposition to concentrating in the government’s economic platform and cuts from the early headway of the racism scandal. One example of austerity is the government’s decision to cut housing subsidies – predicted to offer very little budgetary gain but make it considerably more difficult for people with low, or even medium-to-low, incomes to live in the Helsinki region.

 This, and other such budget measures, are being driven at a considerably fast schedule considering the usual measured speed of legislation, perhaps indicating the government’s wish to get as much of this agenda done in case the government still somehow falls early – or the oncoming recession would raise the question of whether such policies would deepen it.

In other news, a retired general gets sentenced of rape, a citizen’s initiate to ban fur farming moves on to parliamentary proceeding after getting tens of thousands of signatures, and Helsinki is putting a dumb cage around the statue of Havis Amanda, famous in Finland for getting manhandled by the masses every time there’s a sports victory or an equivalent celebration.

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sanna_Marin_in_March_2023#/media/File:Eurooppa-neuvosto_23.%E2%80%9324.3.2023_(52766857233)_(cropped).jpg