Finnish News Recap, Week 41: Gas Pipeline Sabotabe edition

PIPELINE BUSTED: As said previously, probably last week’s biggest local news was a break in the gas pipeline and data cable between Finland and Estonia. While no telecom interruptions were evident, gas supplies might take a hit - though the new floating LNG terminal is going to help there.

Naturally, the suspicions instantly turned towards the eastern neighbor, especially after the pipeline follies in the Baltic a year ago. While we still don’t have a clear picture of *that* particular event (and might never have), the commonly believed explanation in Finland for that event continues to be that, quite simply, Russia did it. And in last week’s case we’re not actually talking about a pipeline Russia has spent a huge effort building itself.

Apparently, there have been Russian and Chinese boats sailing in the Baltic before the pipeline bust up. Again, these boats might have something to do with the events – or they might not. However, it bears noting that Sweden also reported a similar matter a bit later on. Doesn’t seem coincidental to many.

Nevertheless, official communications have had their “tongue in the middle of their mouth”, as a Finnish saying would be literally translated – they’ve been very careful about how they speak. Currently, this is being treated as a matter for police investigation. They’re not even certain yet whether the pipeline has exploded – a Norwegian seismographic analysis would seem to suggest this – or whether it has suffered another form of damage. Some even speculated that the whole thing would have been caused by a ship’s dropped anchor scraping the seaboard…

Of course, should this be a Russian op, it would create quite a furore – unlikely to be Article 5 issue, but might lead to Article 4 conferences with the other NATO members. Indeed, while many speculated during the NATO membership runup that Finland’s application phase would be full of these sorts of events as a part of Russian dissuasion campaign. It wasn’t, but now that Finland is a member, it would be logical for it to be targeted by all sorts of harassment. We’ll know more once there are more studies done.

Whatever the case, none of this has prevented Finland from passing the 19th aid package to Ukraine.

SOCIAL AND HEALTH CARE BLUES: The parliament has opened discussion on the government’s budget. While a lot of individual cuts, and the trade union conflict, will probably get a lot of attention later this year, the last week of the debate between the parties in the government and the opposition have focused on last government’s social and health care reform.

In short, the social and health care reform was an attempt to answer the aging of the population and the urbanization leaving many rural areas high and dry, before. Marin’s government did this by reorganizing the instances in charge of procuring or producing health care into 21 larger regions (previously, much of the power was in the hands of individual municipalities). These regions were primarily the idea of Centre Party, a party which has advocated for such regionalization for a long time, but the other parties were also content to sign on to them.

The current government, whose parties had attempted a social and health care reform before (which failed due to its emphasis on essentially forcing areas to utilize private health care), being seen as unconstitutional. Thus, the attacks on the reform leave unclear what an alternative model would be – unless one really believes that market-based healthcare would be all it takes to solve these major ongoing issues. Considering that currently many of the costs are precisely related to the use of privatized health care or otherwise related to the profit-seeking model, this doesn’t seem likely.

All of this isn’t to say there aren’t problems with the social and health care reform. Many have questioned whether 21 regions is too many for a small country like Finland, and the regions weren’t given the power of taxation – meaning they are completely dependent on the state for their funding, meaning that when a government makes up a plan leaning on austerity, the regions get underfunded. And bleak economic outlook isn’t going to help.

In other news, new presidential candidates entered the field (independent foreign policy expert Mika Aaltola, Left Alliance’s Li Andersson), the ruling center-right National Coalition is back at the top of the polls, and a music artist got some controversy for defending a hockey player credibly accused of rape.

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