MARTTI AHTISAARI DEAD AT 86: Martti Ahtisaari, who was Finland’s president in 1994-2000, is dead at 86. Ahtisaari’s rep in Finland can be compared to Jimmy Carter – not always all that esteemed during his presidency, but after his presidency he’s been one of the most known Finnish figures worldwide. He’s also one of the three Finns to have personally won a Nobel, his being the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ahtisaari was born in 1937 in Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia), still then for some years a part of Finland. After the war he lived in Kuopio and worked as a teacher, in which role he first started his work in development cooperation, first teaching in a school in Karachi and then in the service of Finnish Foreign Ministry in various diplomatic tasks. Probably his most important achievement before the Presidency was his long effort for the independence of Namibia, a country that has had a bit of a special relationship with Finland due to the work of Finnish missionaries in there during the 1900s.
Ahtisaari was elected a president in 1994 as a Social Democrat, a party which he had belonged to for a long time but where he had not really been active in. He was chosen as the party candidate specifically as an outsider, in a situation where the Finnish trust to politics in general was low, and ended up defeating Defense Minister Elisabeth Rehn from the Swedish People’s Party after a populist campaign run by his backers. Ideologically, he has always been on the right wing of social democracy. Especially in the context of 1990s this meant that there was very little concrete difference between him and Rehn, or indeed most other potential options, policy-wise.
Ahtisaari was often mocked during his presidency for, well, mainly for being hefty (he lost a lot of weight after his presidency). He also came at a time where the meaning of the presidency was changing from the strong presidency of preceding Urho Kekkonen and Mauno Koivisto to the (formally) less powerful presidencies after him. Much of his presidency being spent in a kind of limbo where it was still unsure what his actual role even was. The most memorable part of this was the “two plates question” of whether the PM or the President represented Finland in EU high-level meets. In 2000, the new Finnish Constitution clarified this to be the PM’s task.
After his presidency Ahtisaari’s most prominent international tasks were successfully negotiating for peace in Aceh province of Indonesia between the Aceh independence movement and the Indonesian government, and negotiating in Kosovo between Kosovo independentists and Serbians, this time controversially failing to achieve a treaty, leading to Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. The Nobel prize was probably granted more for the former, now a forgotten historical conflict precisely because he was successful, than for the latter, though it was of course also a recognition of his entire career.
Ahtisaari will get a state funeral later this year.
BOOZE LIBERALISATION: Alcohol legislation tends to frequently be an important subject in Finnish politics, at least compared to many other countries. There is a history involved. Finland was one of the few Western countries to experiment with Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s, with similar results to US (i.e., a lot of booze smuggling by organized crime), and even after it ended, the Finnish state has remained worried about the citizens’ wish to booze it up and has attempted to find ways to control this activity strictly.
Thus, during the Cold War era, at least the stereotypical visit to a bar would include the whole crew buying a sandwich between them just to satisfy the requirement that “alcohol can only be served with food”, the implication often being that the sandwich would go to the trash uneaten. After 1969 it was legal to sell alcohol drinks with 4,7% or less strength in stores, but before that, one would have to go the government-owned alcohol monopoly stores, the Alko stores, to do that. Alko still is the only place that sells (all but the very weakest of) wines and strong drinks.
However, ever since the 80s, these laws have been liberalized, both to appeal to voters and in recognition to the continuing liberalization of trade regimes generally and the increased possibilities of the citizens to just buy booze abroad (first by visiting, now also by mail). The new government has, thus, issued a fresh set of proposals, include not only increasing the top limit of alcohol strength for store selling (increased previously to 5,5 %, will be increased to 8,0 %), but also allowing the domestic online sales of alcohol. Probably the most controversial aspect is that it would be possible to order alcohol straight to one’s house through Wolt or Foodora or some other similar delivery service, panned for the potential that low-paid delivery workers would obviously not check the age or the general condition of the persons they’re selling to.
This field is one topic where both main parties in the government – the neoliberal National Coalition and nationalist Finns Party – agree on, as does the often reticent Swedish People’s Party, though it is opposed by the small evangelical-based Christian Democrats, who must be satisfied with a license to vote against the bill in the parliament. The Christian Democrats’ view is probably connected to their base in the evangelical Protestant community, which has had a strong tendency to oppose alcohol in general.
Alcohol politics tends to generally create odd coalitions, pitting the traditional leftists who are support the state monopoly as an alternative to private profiteering together with general nanny-state bureaucrat and doctor types worried of health care costs and religious conservatives as the strict regulation camp, and free-market right-wingers, bougie left-liberals who like craft beers and nationalist conservatives catering to the hard-drinking type of Finnish masculinity as the loose regulation camp.
In any case, the state alcohol monopoly remains secure when it comes to actual booze, though presumably the next step would be for the alcohol liberalizers to openly start challenging it or even advocating for a privatization of Alko. Of course, none of this seemingly affects in any way the legality of intoxicants *other* than alcohol, which remain as illegal as ever.
In other news, a Chinese ship is now suspected of pipeline damage, the government survived its first vote of confidence on social and health care matters, the government announced it is tightening the citizenship criteria, and there’s been a large recorded drop in life expectancy.
Image: Martti Ahtisaari in 1994. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Martti_Ahtisaari_in_1994#/media/File:Martti-Ahtisaari-1994.jpg