this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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The current prez Alexander Stubb is a pretty run of the mill "fiscal conservative" just like our last one. He's at least not outright sympathetic to Nazis, but his party – the National Coalition – is more or less indistinguishable from the extremist right wing "Finns Party". The joke is that the only way to tell the National Coalition MPs apart from the Finns Party MPs is that they wear more expensive suits.
Thankfully the president doesn't have much power anymore, thanks to a… uh… dictator we had 50-ish years ago (Urho Kekkonen. It's complicated, heh.) Naturally conservatives want to expand presidential powers, because of course they fucking do.
Interesting, I just read the Wikipedia article, he looks a bit like a 20th century Orbán
Heh, he was thankfully nowhere near as nuts as Orbán.
As far as autocrats go, his rule could definitely have been much worse – we stayed independent from the USSR, no fucked up secret police hunting down dissidents, the press was free-ish except for anything negative related to Russia (they basically had their boot on our neck and we had to "behave" or they'd invade us again like the good neighbors they are), and so on.
Having a "president for life" isn't exactly optimal, but since I had to grow up in a country with an autocratic leader I'm glad it was Kekkonen and not fucking Brezhnev or Tito.