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Support for the Social Democrats is at the lowest for several years, according to the Finnish broadcasting corporation Yle’s July opinion poll.
Only 20,4 per cent of voters would vote for the SDP if there were a parliamentary election today. This is 2 per cent points lower than in May’s opinion poll – before the SDP elected their new leader, Jutta Urpilainen. This is bad news for the SDP who would clearly have been hoping that a new leader would have bought new momentum to the party and made it look a fresh prospect for voters. That no such favourable bounce has occurred will be worrying for the party, most particularly for Urpilainen, who faces her first major test as party chairman in October’s municipal elections. In the last municipal elections of 2004, the SDP received over 24 per cent of the votes.
Both of the largest government parties, Centre and Kokoomus (National coalition party) enjoy equal popularity; both would receive 22 per cent support of the voters according to Yle’s poll.
Worryingly, the right-wing party ‘True Finns’ again put in a good showing, with 5,9 per cent of voters asked saying that they would vote for them. This could be helped by those wishing to register a protest vote after the electoral financing scandal surrounding all the main parties. For the other parties, changes were small and not significant statistically.
Municipal elections throughout mainland Finland take place on 26 October.
Pictured is SDP chairman Jutta Urpilainen.
The film director Klaus Härö has been awarded with 2 prizes at the Italian ´Giffoni´ film festival. The Giffoni event is considered one of the most important film festival for younger audiences, according to the Finnish News Agency FNB’s report.
Härö was awarded for his work ´Den nya människan´ (´The new person´) which is a dark film set in Sweden during the 1950s in the period of Sweden´s forced sterilisation programme. From 1936 all the way up until 1976, Sweden practised this in what is a dark chapter in our neighbouring country’s history. The state targeted persons (mainly women) for sterilisation for several reasons, including racial purity motivations, heridatory disease transmission and social matters (e.g. individuals seen likely to be prone to criminality etc). An investigation by the Swedish government in the year 2000 estimated that between 20 000 and 30 000 people had been forcibly sterilised; most between the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s.
I am pleased that Härö has again been recognised. He is one of the best and most promising Finnish directors, certainly of this generation, in my opinion. His previous film ´Den bästa av mödrar´(´The best of mothers´) was a very moving work telling the, again reality-based, story of a child evacuee sent from Finland to Sweden during the wartime. This film, quite rightly, collected several awards at the time.
Swedish-speaking Finn Klaus Härö has directed and been involved the making of productions in both national languages. He has previously received the Ingmar Bergman Prize, which is significant as winners were chosen by Bergman himself. Härö was born in Borgå (Porvoo) in 1971, and thus we can hopefully look forward to a lot more from him in the future.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to a trailer of Härö’s film ´Den bästa av mödrar´which is called ´Mother of Mine´in English. There is English subtitles which surely means the film is available to buy/rent with them. So, I doubly recommend it to those of you who are interested in seeing a good film which tells a lot about one aspect of Finland´s wartime history. http://www.aideistaparhain.com/large.html
Picture: Klaus Härö appearing on the talk show ´Bettina S’ (Finlands Svenska Television).
Many Swedish-speaking callers are still being requested to speak Finnish when making emergency alarm calls to the 112 emergency alarm centres. That’s according to a report on Yle’s website. 112 is the number of the police/fire/ambulance in Finland. Several years ago, the 112 alarm centres were reorganised and amalgamated into larger regional centres covering relatively large areas. Previously they were organised as much smaller and more local units. 112-alarm centres that contain Swedish-speaking areas are meant to be able to handle calls in both national languages.
However, since the amalgamation which has meant that 112 alarm centres are often located far away from callers, there have been numerous reports of Swedish-language service deteriorating seriously – especially in southern Finland. In one case, one elderly man from Borgå (Porvoo) reported that he was put on hold for 15 minutes after calling for an ambulance whilst in distress. He was unable to speak his limited Finnish because he was so panicked. Even after finally being connected to someone who spoke Swedish, the alarm centre still demanded his address in Finnish. Mercifully, he survived (it turned out he was suffering bleeding in the stomach and an acute urine infection, both potentially fatal conditions if not treated immediately) – but incidents like this could easily cost lives. This case was bought up in parliament by Mikaela Nylander (Swedish People’s Party, Sfp) last year. There have been similar cases reported in the media.
The problem seems to be that the Interior Ministry refuses to recognise the problem as real. In the past, all 112 alarm centre operators were required to be able to speak both Finnish and Swedish. Today, the employment demand is that alarm centre staff must be educated as either a police officer or alarm centre operator; there is no language requirement.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the training course for alarm centre operators is only offered in Kuopio and Tampere; locations both long distances from Swedish-speaking Finland. This means that few functionally bilingual or Swedish-speaking Finns are signing up for the course. Surely, the opening of a course somewhere in Swedish-speaking Finland (why not in the capital area, which surely has a polytechnic with room for such a thing) would help solve the shortage of operators with language skills. Additionally, the 112 alarm centre are not always located in the most logical of places. The alarm centre coving the whole of eastern Nyland/Uusimaa (a district in which a third of the population have Swedish as their mother tongue) is located in Kerava – a unilingual Finnish-speaking munipality. It’s hardly rocket science to realise that they might have more difficulty finding linguistically able staff in such a location than if they had located it somewhere with a significant Swedish-speaking population.
From reading this blog, you might – especially if you’re ungenerous! – get the impression that Swedish-speaking Finns spend too much time moaning about language services. Perhaps that’s sometimes true. But, in this case, it is quite literally a matter of life and death. When one is panicked, and one is often in such a situation when one needs to ring 112, it’s hard enough to speak in a sensible way in one’s mother tongue let alone another language. Therefore, even forgetting the not insignifcant numbers of Swedish-speaking Finns who do lack a good command of the Finnish language (and many of these are amongst the elderly, a demographic perhaps more likely to need to ring for an ambulance), Swedish-speaking Finns with a workable – even fluent – command of Finnish need to be able to rely on being able to speak Swedish when dialing 112. This is one area of language service provision where it is completely irresponsible for the authorities to deny there is a problem.
I recently discovered an interesting blog called ‘Migrant Tales‘. The author of which is clearly concerned with immigration matters and writes a lot on Finland’s migration politics. Often, in debates on how immigrants should be integrated into Finnish society, one hears the argument “When in Rome, do as the Romans”; in other words, that integration should mean that migrants to Finland so quickly as possibly forget their own background and take on entirely a Finnish lifestyle – essentially abandoning or replacing their own cultural values and taking on ours completely. This argument comes up in comments to Migrant Tales and in many other online and offline debates on immigration and integration policy.
This “When in Rome, do as the Romans attitude” got me thinking today when I heard a story on Yle Radio Västnyland (I’m on holiday at the moment in my wife’s home area near Ekenäs) this morning about the increase in people moving from the capital region to the rural municipality of Ingå. The report was about this high level of Finnish-speakers moving into Ingå causing the municipality’s sole Finnish-language school becoming overcrowded and featured a Kokoomus (National Coalition party) Finnish-speaking member of the Ingå council suggesting that Ingå ought to urgently look to constructing a new, second Finnish-language school in the municipaltiy as many Finnish-speaking families were “making do” with putting their children in Swedish-language Ingå schools to save them from travelling longer distances to the municipality’s one Finnish school.
Now, I wonder what the “When in Rome, do as the Romans” attitude holders would make of this. Surely if Rome were Ingå, and one was to do as the local ‘Romans’, one should be adopting the Swedish-language rather than insisting on Finnish language services. Today’s Ingå is a bilingual municipality with Swedish as the majority language (according to the municipal website, around 57% of the 5 458 residents speak Swedish – 40% have Finnish as their mother tongue.) If one went back to 1950, before any widescale immigration to the municipality had got underway, you would have found that 89,5% of Ingå’s residents spoke Swedish as their mother tongue (according to Folktinget’s statistics). Before the wars of the 40s, you would have found that the municipality was unilingually Swedish-speaking. So, presumably if you held the “When in Rome” attitude, you would be condemning those unthoughtful Finnish-speaking immigrants of today and the latter half of the 20th century for not integrating and insisting on the superceding of their own culture on to the Finland-Swedish. You would be accusing them of failing to act as one should in Rome.
Incidentally, this argument could be applied to many, many more districts – including municipalities that no Finnish speaker would think of as a traditionally Swedish-speaking area today; for instance, the capital region’s Esbo (Espoo) which is today’s second largest city in Finland with around 235 000 residents (mainly due to immigrants from the rest of the country moving to the capital region) was 43% Swedish-speaking still in 1950. Today it is 8,9%. Before the wars and in the first half of the 20th century it was still a very rural, sparsely populated unilingual Swedish municipality. Is this another example where the “When in Rome” attitude holders would see a failure?
Now, I’m not arguing for the application of the “When in Rome, do as the Romans” (i.e. integrate completely or stay away) attitude in official policy. Hopefully my thoughts here help expose such thinking as unrealistic at the very least. I would love to hear from some “When in Rome, do as the Romans” attitude holders as to whether their beliefs also cover their own Finnish-speaking compatriots when they have chosen to move to Swedish-speaking areas and often cause them to dramatically change in cultural and linguistic character.
