Don’t hold you breath for Round 2 for whoever of the two wins the presidential contest. If Stubb or Haavisto wins, then we will have a reasonable chance he will do fine since there are few differences between the two of them.
The Big News is that the others did not pass the litmus test and for that we must be very thankful!
Our biggest challenge that we are facing here today is not choosing a president, nor is it Russia who keeps on killing innocent Ukrainians like no tomorrow.
No, our biggest challenge are our rightwing politicians who have all forgotten how to compromise with others. The Prime Minister has all but disappeared behind the backs of the True Finns, who are out with their knives. And this is not very nice because they know next to nothing about managing our economy.
The Prime Minister’s Conservative Party and the True Finns did not receive an absolute majority and had to use two tiny parties to get a majority in Parliament leaving the opposition to lick their wounds, This means that the rest of the voting population is being asked to swallow huge cuts in care of the elderly, healthcare and education while the right-wingers still talk about tax cuts and the impossibility of tax increases.
We were never promised this by the current government but they did a dirty one and now most people here – workers, pensioners, the unemployed and those who are seriously ill – will all be facing huge cuts in the funding of public services. This is being publicised because we are told that taxes cannot be increased because more people need to be incentivised to work…
At the same time strikes are being organised because the government refuses to talk with the opposition and the unions, except the employers’ union! The strikes will hit the economy at the same time as unemployment is rising because our central bank is killing business with interest rates that a way above inflation!
It is a great time to push the economy into a crisis when the rest of Europe is also facing tougher times.
Bankruptcies rage throughout the economy just now… we are at a higher number that after the 2007/2008 financial crisis.
The right wing government tells us the lie that we have the highest tax rates in the world.
That is not a fact, but a fairy story!
Many other democratic countries in the west have higher tax rates, especially when you take into account that we get free education all the way to university, and almost free excellent healthcare. When these are factored into our daily budgets, Finland has a super low tax rate.
So the present danger we face is the purely domestic one, caused by the right-wings’s intransigency, that is not based on facts or scientific evidence.
