Sweden Concerned About Outcome Elections Finland - The Nordic Reporter

Concerns have arisen in Sweden after the anti-European party Perussuomalaiset (True Finns) won 39 of the 200 seats in the parliamentary elections in neighbouring Finland. The position of the Swedish minority in Finland is particularly feared.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt writes on his weblog that he is “concerned”. ”Not in the least about the tone against Swedish as a minority language”.

The leader of Sweden’s largest political party, Håkan Juholt (Socialists), is “worrying that a party without social responsibility achieved such a large election gain.” The True Finns have become the third political party in the Finnish parliament.

Finnish national broadcaster Yle reported Monday that at least half of the new parliament is in favour of abolishing Swedish as a compulsory language in Finnish education.

Also, the only Swedish-speaking brigade of the Finnish armed forces is slated to be cut. About 291,500 of the 5.3 million Finns have Swedish as their mother tongue (5.5 percent). At the beginning of 1900 this was still 15 percent.

Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809 in a war. Finland became independent in 1917. | © 2011 Marcel Burger for ANP News Agency (original published in Dutch on 18 April 2011)

GREENLAND, 12 SEP 2023: Cruise ship Ocean Explorer with 206 people on board has gone aground in the Alpefjord of Greenland, where the Nordøstgrønland National Park is situated, on Tuesday. The Danish military - Greenland is a semi-autonomous country, under Danish rule - has sent patrol vessel P570 Knud Rasmussen to the area. But it will take days for it to sail the more than 1,200 kilometres (about 650 nautical miles) to the Ocean Explorer. The Danish Arctic Command hopes the vessel is able to get itself free with high tide.

FINLAND, 11 SEP 2023: Three neo-nazis stand accused in Finland for preparing a terror attack, that included shooting the then Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The trial against the three men, of which the main suspect was a candidate for the so-called True Finns political party, started in the court of Päijänne-Tavastland. All suspects are Finnish and key-evidence is there own statements, intercepted Telegram communications between the suspects and 3D printed guns. The men are 21, 26, 28 years old. A 66-year-old man is suspected of aiding, but does not stand trial in this case.

SWEDEN, 11 SEP 2023: Ten people are accused of killing a 15-yr-old boy in a sushi restaurant in Skogås, as Stockholm suburb, in January. The ten are between 16 and 27 years old, and include the 16-yr-old guy that pulled the trigger and killed the then equally old boy, investigators say. The police beliefs the hit was ordered and can be connected to the so-called "Kurdish fox" (kurdiska räven), which has been identified by Swedish police as a major crime boss. Of the ten suspects of this killing, only one remains at large. #shootingssweden

NOTE, 1 SEPTEMBER 2023:
Twitter ends. Over the past 13 years I used Twitter to bring you daily news, quickly and short, in addition to my web channel. First from Scandinavia, with Poland and the Baltic states added a few years ago. I have decided to leave Twitter/X. Once, it was a great, free and simple channel, easy to include in my website and accessible to all - even for those without a Twitter account. That were precisely the reasons why I used Twitter, during most of my 15 years as a correspondent/reporter based in Sweden, and even after I moved to Poland more than 2 years ago.
Recent changes dictated by Musk, and especially today's announcement that X will demand more privacy sensitive data from its users, have fuelled my decision.
If you have been one of my almost 1.6K regular followers of my daily tweets, which totalled more than 15.900, big thank you (!!!) for your confidence in me during the past dozen years.