Ilkka Kanerva is no Foreign Minister any longer, having resigned this morning, and for that I am pleased. May that what is to be found below amuse you and serve as our conclusive remark. Hymy (which, incidentally, means "Smile") printed some 20 of them, these are the ones that I gathered from the Finnish Wikipedia. I'm a notoriously bad translator, so for all possible errors you can blame me and only me. If I missed any valuable nuances, do let me know.
"...if you [two] are interested to sit down, eat and see what then..."
"I find it lovely to watch when the partner is aroused and shows what's what. You wouldn't dare?"
"Oh damn, Sunday would have been fine, but I'm again abroad. I too went out and felt like to...meet."
"Also two is OK, the man involved. I meant dinner, if the woman (women) seduce and you start to feel like to. What to do?"
"Indeed. I think I said how charming they look on woman. Without knowing what is underneath! Since can't tell of your daring..."
"Sounds almost like fantasy. Have you taken good care of your garden?"
"Do you wanna do it in some exciting place? What could it be?"
"How would it feel to touch you with fingers, in a nightclub"
"No, also yesterday might have been OK. You praise your sister so much that I start to be keen to meet her as well."
"Wow, what a picture! Can't get much better than that. Does your sister have the same sex appeal?"
"I also read those answers. Besides everything else you goddammit are smart as well! Even better!"
"Yeah but how do you make sure that there won't be any stories in papers. That's impossible. Now nothing happened and you won't gossip or anything. Otherwise OK. Are you in a bar?"
Make of that what you will. Hardly anything stroke-provoking, but that's not important. Or can somebody seriously imagine a meeting where the National Coalition's parliamentary group would have sat down and through careful hermeneutics judge whether the explicit dimensions of His Excellency's prose could be considered appropriate or not? That would have been a bizarre sight. Basically the same goes for claims that Kanerva's biggest mistake was the fact that he lied - sounds sweet and Protestant and all that, but could you actually picture a serious press conference which starts in a following manner:
- So, Mr Kanerva, what did you actually discuss in your correspondence with that lady?
- Oh many things - but primarily her lingerie, her pubic hair, her sister, and my fingers. I also asked her not to tell anyone about it.
Aye, what a boost for ministerial credibility that would have been.
Alex Stubb is Finland's new Foreign Minister. Depending on whether I will manage to come across new and interesting Albanian music videos or something else that I at this very moment find about 100 times more significant than walks of life of politicians from that particular party, I may or may not be arsed to post about him one of these days. Or now to think about it again, I kind of feel that I won't be arsed. Sorry. So in the meantime, you could do much worse than turning to Svenskfinland, which seems to be a great addition to Finland's English blogland.
Alexander is a good move by the Coalition though, and their only good move during the whole farce. I think I've voted them twice since I was granted my suffrage - which is not terribly long ago - but this latest demonstration of utter idiocy has really, really pissed me off. "Pooh-pooh, old buddy, hush-hush, it's alright, now we just wait till the drones get bored and start watching F1 and then everything's back to normal." You arrogant, shameless and miserable pieces of broilercrap. A special mention goes to Ben Zyskowicz and the funny jokes he made about the topic. Har har har. I laughed. Almost.
Kokoomus, what a rubbish party.
6 comments:
Alexander Dubb?
"Mr Kanerva will be replaced by Alexander Dubb, a member of the European parliament who is a strong supporter of Finland joining Nato." (FT 4/2/2008)
It is OK as long as the Finnish foreign minister is not A. Dumb...
Stubb is vibrant, enthusiastic and very knowledgable about the EU. Maybe you could, if you wanted to be frivolous, even describe him as exciting (perhaps even over-excitable) and "cool", at least compared to Vanhanen and Katainen (although, that's not hard really).
But, I do think he's going to be in for a shock. He's used to speaking on impulse and in quite a passionate way (this is where his over-excitability comes in). He has zero experience of domestic politics and the eduskunta. I think he's going to find it hard to moderate himself and compromise his own views for that of the wider government and the president. After all, Halonen has made it clear that she still leads foreign policy in her view and they have pretty divergent world views. So, at very least, he could find the job frustrating.
That said, I think he might well come across as popular with the people (esp younger ones) and rejuvenate Kokoomus. Perhaps, for their success, they need him for a bit of character rehabilitation after their mess-up with handling Kanerva.
From my narrower perspective, if he should stand for parliament next time in Helsinki, I think he could be a real electoral headache for Sfp/Rkp and Thors (currently Sfp's only Helsinki MP). The vast majority of Helsinki Sfp voters would be Kokoomus voters if they were Finnish speaking and bilingual Stubb might well find it easy to bring them across the whole way. Language is not as strong an issue with Helsinki Swedish-speakers as they are so extremely integrated anyway.
"Basically the same goes for claims that Kanerva's biggest mistake was the fact that he lied - sounds sweet and Protestant and all that, but could you actually picture a serious press conference which starts in a following manner:
- So, Mr Kanerva, what did you actually discuss in your correspondence with that lady?
- Oh many things - but primarily her lingerie, her pubic hair, her sister, and my fingers. I also asked her not to tell anyone about it.
Aye, what a boost for ministerial credibility that would have been."
Bollocks. Had he admitted that he did send the messages, and stated that they were private, from the beginning there wouldn't have been this big a fuss about it.
Timo Soini said this three weeks ago already and when he speaks about handling the public image, you better listen and learn.
I think a lot of this is down to who it is and the way he is perceived to have reacted, rather than any actual wrongdoing. That stuff's between him and his 'partner', but after the sexual harassment in parliament story, and the slightly ribald 'boys will be boys' response from his peers, it wasn't going to go away.
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