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HELSINGIN SANOMAT INTERNATIONAL EDITION - HOME |
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| You arrived here at 10:35 Helsinki time Thursday 23.2.2012 |
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By Piia Elonen
Pekka Haavisto's sweeping late run to carry him into the second round run-off for the office of President of the Republic was something of a surprise, given the lay of the land in advance of the election. Haavisto's own party - the Greens - is small, and the Greens are not in any case perceived as any kind of "presidential party" hereabouts. Haavisto's success was also something of a surprise when one considers that the candidate is openly gay and living in a registered partnership. To be sure, for some voters this is a problem, but it never developed into an election issue as such. In the end, relatively few people seemed to have any interest one way or another in Haavisto's sexual orientation. How times have changed! It was all very different 12 years ago, when Tarja Halonen was making her first bid to become President. When Halonen, the former Minister for Foreign Affairs, was in the mix and the second round against the Centre Party's Esko Aho, there was quite enough tut-tutting even over the fact that she was then living in a common-law marriage with her partner Pentti Arajärvi. The two tied the knot formally in August 2000 after a relationship dating back fifteen years, but during the election campaign itself expressions like "cohabitation" and "living in sin" were practically spat out in a disapproving tone. Doubts and nasty mutterings were also spawned by the fact that between 1980 and 1981, Helsinki MP Halonen had served as the Chair of SETA (Seksuaalinen Tasavertaisuus RY, "Sexual Equality"), the principal LGBT rights organisation and lobby group in Finland. In the mudslinging, Halonen was labelled as a "SETA activist" campaigning for gay rights and even as a lesbian. A child born out of wedlock (admittedly now in her early thirties), Halonen's being a single parent, and her not belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland were all added to the candidate's list of sins and shortcomings. Erkki Laatikainen, the then editor-in-chief of the Jyväskylä-based newspaper Keskisuomalainen, opined that the tolerance limits of the forest and street Finn would be overly stretched by this volume of baggage that Halonen was carrying. It is quite impossible to imagine that in the world of 2000 a man living together with another man could have progressed from the first round of the elections. During the term of President Martti Ahtisaari (1994-2000) there was a good deal of tongue-wagging over how it was possible that the son of the President of the Republic - the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces, no less! - could elect to do the alternative civilian service rather than become a conscript in the army. Critical remarks were heard from the press and also from the then Chief of Defence Gen. Gustav Hägglund. To give one example, a writer to the opinion pages of Helsingin Sanomat fulminated that yes indeed, even at the age of nearly thirty Marko Ahtisaari is "a member of the President's family", whose doings and lapses are an integral part of the "opinion leadership" that had been repeatedly trumpeted during the election campaign. Well, welcome to Finland now: Haavisto is himself a graduate of "alternative service" and did not spend his late teens or early twenties* crawling through the forests with an assault rifle. It is just twelve short years from Halonen's election and the SETA panic reactions. Much has happened in the intervening period. Finland recognised registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 2002. Gay couples won the right to adopt the biological children of their partner in May 2009. And for the last 12 years the Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces has been a woman who has not served a day in the military. Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 24.1.2012 *Military (or civilian) service is mandatory for Finnish males. The obligation to enter into service begins at the age of 19, and may be postponed to the age of 29, when it becomes either mandatory or the conscript is exempted. The minimum duration is six months (180 days); those trained as officers or NCOs serve for twelve months (362 days), specialist troops serve for nine or twelve months, and those who have chosen the non-military alternative are obliged to carry out twelve months of civilian service.
PIIA ELONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
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