Here’s some underreported news.
Finland’s newly elected parliament on Tuesday voted in favour of National Coalition Party leader Petteri Orpo to become prime minister, as widely expected, ushering in a right-wing government and ending Social Democrat Sanna Marin’s rule.
Orpo will lead a coalition of the conservative NCP, the nationalist Finns, the minority-language Swedish People’s Party and the Christian Democrats, which together won a majority of parliamentary seats in the April 2 election.
The new finance minister will be Riikka Purra, head of the eurosceptic Finns Party, while the NCP’s deputy leader Elina Valtonen will become foreign minister when the government takes office later on Tuesday.
“I warmly thank you for the confidence you’ve shown me,” Orpo told parliament shortly after the vote.
A self-styled fiscal conservative, Orpo campaigned on a promise to reduce the government’s budget deficit by cutting spending while also reducing taxes and seeking to boost private sector job creation.
The new coalition also shifts immigration policy to the right, aiming to cut refugee quotas, raise the bar for work-based visas and make it more difficult for foreigners to obtain citizenship, key priorities for the Finns Party.
Orpo is hardly a bomb-thrower, with previous stints on the boards of the European Investment Bank and the European Stability Mechanism, which are embedded very deep inside the EU’s deep state. Nor will Finland’s new coalition be mistaken for the second coming of Ronald Reagan.
But time and time again we’re told that the EU policies (just like Social Justice policies in the U.S.) are popular, while time and time again EU member states elect government that oppose many of those policies, especially those favoring unlimited Muslim immigration into member countries.
Finally, those who assert that Euroskeptacism goes hand in hand with appeasing Russia will find that they’re mistaken, as Orpo backed Ukraine and Finland joining NATO.
For Finland Russia’s proximity is a key geostrategic fact, and the war in Ukraine indicates how the problems associated with Russia’s aggressive behaviour have materialized. Russia is defining its interests in a way that threatens peace in Europe and creates insecurity in others. During the past decade, there have been uprisings in several of Russia’s neighbors, which the Kremlin has sought to violently suppress. Russia seeks a new sphere of influence and wants to halt the democratic development of other countries. Not NATO, but the people’s will to decide for themselves seems to be a threat to Putin’s regime.
Finland’s new government, like the old, is firmly in the NATO camp. Funny how fighting the Soviet Union/Russia repeatedly throughout the 20th Century will do that…
Tags: Elina Valtonen, EU, European Investment Bank, European Stability Mechanism, Euroskeptic, Finland, Foreign Policy, immigration, Islam, NATO, Petteri Orpo, Riikka Purra, Russo-Ukrainian War
Euroskeptic and anti-Russian is always a good thing. I guess they felt NATO was the way to go. Personally, I would have gone in a different direction – Europe’s largest non-NATO military – to rival Poland, but I realize Finland doesn’t have the population to go it alone.
I value independence very highly. Yes, being independent is very costly, but in the end worth it. Sadly, it looks like the Eurozone – with a few exceptions – is going to go all in on NATO alignment. I just hope they don’t bitch too loudly in the future when they realize what they signed up for turns out to be more of a political union than a military one.
I’d like nothing more than for the USA to get out of the world policeman business and for European countries to finally put in their fair share on securing their own defense needs, which they have never done since the Berlin Wall fell. But then I realize that the current state of affairs won’t last forever. Someday, they’re going to have to, either because the US went bust or the US simply can’t for one reason or another.
Full scale Pacifc War 2:Electric Boogaloo might be that “another reason”. We’ll see.
[…] Finland Elects Euroskeptic Government. “Time and time again we’re told that the EU policies (just like Social Justice policies in […]
Finland was unaligned since the formation of NATO until 30 years after the fall of the USSR. So much for the “fighting” innuendo. They were dragged into NATO by EU manipulation and malfeasance of their ruling elites.
Well, the Russian perspective has been heard…
What I think would be way more accurate to say is that the Finns were “unaligned” due to brute force from the Soviet Union, otherwise they’d have been aligned with their original WWII allies in the West who supported them through the Winter War. Do remember that at the time that happened, the Soviets were literally allied with the Nazis, and once the natural consequences of that came out, the Finns wound up falling into the Nazi camp simply because nobody else was on their side due to “Soviet”. So, as usual, very much a Soviet own-goal. They’d have had a very robustly neutral nation on their northern flank, had they not tried raping Finland the way they did the Baltics. Instead, they got wartime Finland that chose only to support Germany far enough to recover the land they lost in the Winter War. Post-WWII, I suspect that having had their hands burnt off at the wrist, the Soviets under Stalin weren’t going to try that BS again, and they settled for the neutrality they could have had in 1939.
The reason that Finland is now in NATO is strictly down to Putin’s idiot adventure in Ukraine. I don’t think the neutralist parties could have been overcome in Finnish politics absent that bit of genius geopolitics, but Russia will continue to do Russia.
Quite of a piece with WWII… They enabled the start of it all, giving Hitler everything that he needed to take down the French and the rest of Western Europe, and then had the absolute balls to act like “victims” when Hitler did just as he said he would, and turned on them. Sixty years of propaganda later, and everyone has forgotten about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, except the various victims thereof in Eastern Europe.
And, Russians wonder why they’re hated and despised across all their peripheral nations? I’d laugh, but it ain’t going to be funny when the current regime in Belarus falls. Wouldn’t surprise me if the Belarus military is actually making plans to seize those conveniently-based nukes, and then use them to tell the Russians to get out, stay out, and never come back. Lukashenko is in power; that doesn’t mean he’s in authority.
Russia is in for some harsh times. Deservedly. They still haven’t paid the price for enabling Hitler, and deserve a few decades or more of suffering to pay. I look forward to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy being all that remains of their little empire, which ain’t too far off if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly.
I don’t think Finland wanted to be in NATO, they were doing ok as a neutral, but what’s the alternative now? Just follow how those geographically closest to Russia have reacted to the invasion of Ukraine. That tells you all you need to know. It’s pretty clear Poland, the Baltics, Romania etc all think they could be next on the list for little green men or real invasion.
I was saying it twenty years ago, and I’ll say it again: Putin is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Russia.
They had an opportunity to recover from the seventy-year vacation they took from reality with the Communists; Putin chose not to do a damn thing that would help the Russian people across the swathe of the former Soviet Union he gained control of. Not a single goddamn thing got done to help fix the root causes of their demographic problems; they raped what legacy they got from the Soviet times, monetizing it in the most stupid manner possible. They had the crown f*cking jewels there, in the aerospace industrial legacy they had. Thanks to US fecklessness, they had a window there that they could have dominated the world’s space efforts and parlayed that into something real. Instead, they laughed Elon Musk out of the room and right into SpaceX, which has basically eaten everyone’s lunch. They could have worked with him, and God alone knows where we’d be today. Just like everything else, Putin took the course of “glory”, and paid no heed to the fundamentals that were being eaten out from under him. A large part of why they’re losing the war right now? Those fundamentals.
Look, here’s a clue: When you can’t manage to produce a decent NCO corps? You’ve got problems, ones you need to address before you try taking over the world with your ill-disciplined and barbaric forces. The Ukrainians are eating the Russians alive at low level operations, and the only reason the Russians are even still in Ukraine is the size and scale of the forces they committed… Which they’ve pissed away doing stupid things like try to take Bakhmut. Realistically, with the scale of the forces engaged and the huge mismatch in terms of weapons capabilities, the Russians have no business losing to the Ukrainians the way they are. Except for one thing, and one thing only: Vast military incompetencies throughout their system. The next few weeks are going to show some astonishing things, I believe. And, they won’t be astonishing in the sense of “Wow, look at how effective the Russians are…”, it’s gonna be more like “Holy f*ck, are these clowns incompetent, or what…?”
“Look, here’s a clue: When you can’t manage to produce a decent NCO corps? You’ve got problems, ones you need to address before you try taking over the world with your ill-disciplined and barbaric forces.”
Whelp, Kirk, I’d say the Russians and Chinese are fixing that problem. Not by creating a decent NCO corps, but by undermining the NCO corps of their major opponent, the US. Their paid stooges are infiltrating the US Military with DEI nonsense, leading to promotion on the basis of skin color, connections, and political reliability.
A decent NCO corps withers away in that kind of environment. Soon their ill-disciplined and barbaric forces will only be opposed by our ill-disciplined and barbaric forces. Got to give the enemy props for playing the long game that way. It will be an own-goal by us, entirely preventable, if that happens.
All of that DEI BS is self-inflicted wounds of our own making.
It’s the exact same issue that produced the Doolittle Board back at the end of the WWII era, and which led directly to the collapse of the Army under fire in Korea.
The root problem here? The ball-less officers we put in charge of the armed forces. Who’re also stone-ignorant of how the instrument they’ve been given actually works, and who demonstrate zero interest in learning.
We wrecked the NCO corps at least three times since WWII. First, with the Doolittle reforms, then with the refusal to use the National Guard or Reserves in Vietnam, which put the Regular Army NCO corps into back-to-back deployments. The ones we didn’t kill either broke or wore out. Then, they delivered the coup-de-grace with the ill-conceived VOLAR “reforms” that really did more damage than good (not the volunteer Army thing, the accompanying “feel good” initiatives in the barracks, not least of which was all the racial “equity” bullshit).
All of this was performed in a fit of absent-mindedness by men who really had no f*cking clue how the Army works down at the squad level. You want illumination, there’s a chapter in T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War that lays it all out… You want to understand what the Army will look like after the DEI vandals get done, read that entire book and weep, because they’re doing the exact same thing all over again.
This all comes because the assholes put in charge of the institution do not understand it, don’t believe in its mission, and refuse to defend it when the activists come calling. And, if they do, they do so ineptly and without real effect. Look at the Marines; they f*cking well demonstrated that integrating women into the combat arms resulted in massive issues; then, they rolled over and exposed their bellies for scratchies like the little bitches they are. The Army was even worse; at least the Marines did the requisite testing. The Army? LOL… Yeah. Just executed, even though everyone but the young women they recruited for those positions knows better.
The real problem we have here is that the officer corps isn’t really the military; they’re just the hired help that manages the place. The real military is out there in the units, and it doesn’t have a voice or even anyone who really consciously understands it, at all. It is resident in the cadres that stay in the units, not the officers. And, why is that? Because we set the officer corps up as a rotating cast of thousands with no real investment in the organizations they lead. Officers don’t look at their role with the units as anything other than “They gave me this cool toy to play with so I can make a career for myself…”
None of them understand the troops, or the unit. Hell, the vast majority of the NCO corps doesn’t. Nobody thinks about this stuff, which is why morons like Shinseki can get the idea into their heads that giving everyone in the Army a Ranger black beret would be “good for morale” and “enhance professionalism”. That’s not how that shit works, period.
And, the telling thing is? They don’t understand it. Just like the constant changing of the dress uniforms, which hardly ever get worn for any real reason these days. Nobody in the barracks is saying to their buddies “Hey, let’s get into our dress uniforms and go downtown…” They only wear those damn things when the command demands it. It’s pure costumery; the officers playing dress-up with real men. Everything the dress uniforms do could be accomplished with a central concessionaire renting the damn things like tuxedos; there’s no need to have one for every single soldier. All it is is a goddamn expense that most of them can’t afford; I’ve got mid-level NCO friends nearing retirement now that have had to buy two entirely new and different sets of dress uniforms which they were never reimbursed for, as the clothing allowance barely covers maintenance on your field uniforms.
And, it’s utterly stupid; they think it’s “good for morale” because they don’t understand what actually makes for good morale vs. play-acting. The brass just doesn’t get it, at all. They’ve got no clue how things really work, or what they’re actually doing with their policies. They sit at the levers of power, and have no idea what happens when they move them. It’s utterly bizarre; were you to ask them what they accomplished, they’ll proudly tell you “I implemented policy X…”, never grasping what policy X actually led to, because they never went out and looked. They don’t know to do that; they think the world springs forth from the brilliance of their intellect: As they write, so shall it be.
Harsh reality? It don’t work like that, homies. You put a policy into place without looking the ground truth explanation for why people were doing that thing you wanted them to stop doing? Or, conversely, get them to do? You’re going to fail, because you’ve failed to address the actual environment that virtually mandated that behavior.
It’s like, OK… Look at the weight control problem they have. Troops don’t eat healthily; that’s an issue. But, for the love of God, go look at what the f*ck is usually available to them: A never-ending cornucopia of junk food, fast food, and empty calories. The dining facilities are open for limited hours; troop gets hungry, where’s he got to go? The shoppette (think military 7-11) or one of the fast-food outlets on post, assuming they have the means to get there. And, what’s available at those places? The exact f*cking thing you say you don’t want them eating… Zero effort has been made to fix that issue; they just rail about the fatties. Meanwhile, the gyms are only open fixed hours, and are usually way overcrowded. And, when you think about the whole thing, the culture is f*cking insane: What does the entire NCO corps do for behavioral disincentives? Why, exercise… WTF? You’re going to use that which you want the troops doing as a punishment? How does that make sense?
No, they’re going to wreck the Army. Again. And, then a bunch of idiots will work their asses off fixing it. Again. I did my share back in the 1980s; someone else can fix what they’re breaking now.
Morons.