finland

Impressed..

The government of Finland https://t.co/yOH9po5x7o pic.twitter.com/F6KlxMsppw

— Spanish Art Restorer (@lib_crusher) November 14, 2020

That's not the whole government though, that's the the prime minister and three other ministers, all whom are leaders of the parties in the government (from left to right: Left Alliance, Centre Party, Social Democrats, Green Party). Also, people like to share that shot instead of another one taken at the same time, which includes the leader of fifth party in the goverment (the Swedish Party), who's also a woman, presumably because she's middle-aged and not in her thirties:

https://d1ddzfo1d7bgrb.cloudfront.net/aamulehti/f1e2e414-2133-592d-a394-c3706bdc1c37-800x_.jpg

Also also, that image is from last year, and since then the leader of the Centre Party has changed, here's a more recent image of the five party leaders:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhVFabsXcAELRtV.jpg

👍👍👍

I love Finland. Were it not for the stupid rona I’d have visited again in May and would be going again to Lapland in February. Another year hopefully.

Finland has a Swedish Party?

Not dogging you all. Just wondering why we can't have a Swedish Party too.

The area now known as Finland was a part of Sweden for centuries, so there's a notable Swedish-speaking minority here, something like 5 % of the population.

Sibelius was Swede-Finn?

Only 5%?

Is there a Finland Party in Russia?

Yeah. The area of Finland was kind of a backwater in the Swedish empire, so not that many people moved here from Sweden proper, and when Russia conquered the area from Sweden in the 19th century, presumably some of them moved back.

(xpost)

And Sibelius was a Swedish-speaking Finn, yeah. As was Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins.

I know I could just go look this up, but are the Swedish Party in favour of returning Finland to Sweden? Or a party specifically pushing policies representing Swedish Finns? Or is it just a name left over from history?

The second one, my friend lives on the east coast and they learn Swedish there and have a decent number of Swedish speakers (as you’d expect given proximity).

Finnish universities have special chairs for Swedish-speaking professors who can ensure a sufficient number of courses in Swedish. It amounts to affirmative action for the Swedish-speaking community.

In reverse Swedes seem to have been a whole lot less appreciative of Finns, though most of my knowledge of historic Swedish-Finnish relations come from reading and reading about Strindberg, which is not as ideal as he hated everyone.

Yeah, that's true. Because the area of Finland was colonised by Sweden, the Swedish-speaking minority that lived here were largely landowners, aristocrats, administrators and other members of upper classes, and they retained much of their wealth and power throughout the Russian rule and all the way to 20th century and the era of Finnish independence. Because of this, they were able to negotiate very good minority rights and benefits for themselves, right down to Swedish being the second official language of Finland. The Swedish Party is mostly dedicated to ensuing those rights and benefits continue to exist. The Finnish-speaking minority in Sweden, in contrast, is largely working-class people and their descendants who moved to Sweden for work, and their official rights and benefits aren't half as good as what the Swedish-speakers have here.