Finnish Parliament Centennial celebrations

The Finnish Parliament celebrated its’ centennial yesterday. Finland was the first country in the world to give both women and men equal right to vote for their representatives to the Parliament a hundred years ago. Yesterday the television was full of broadcasts of the celebrations. We were shown the Celebration session from the House of Parliament, the celebrations at the Opera and the festive buffet afterwards.

In the very first Finnish Parliament there were 19 women, how is that for equality between the sexes?!?

There is a female President in Finland, and she was re-elected in the last Presidential elections, and there are now 76 women in the Parliament.

And quite a progressive Parliament one century ago it indeed was, taken in concern that Finland by then was governed as an autonome part of the Russian Empire, to declare its’ independence at the time of the Russian Revolution in December 1917. Before that Finland was a part of the Swedish Kingdom for several hundreds of years until the war against Russia in 1809.

Now with almost a century of independence, I think the freedom has taken a few steps back since the Sufragettes straining for the right to vote with joining the EU. EU is growing too rapidly and has become too big a machinery to be a quick enough to keep up with the pace of modern life with all legislations and regulations to be carried out. Only good thing I have seen so far is when travelling abroad and not having to change the money into new currencies all the time.

Anyway, great turbulence was yesterday stirred up by one of the female members of Parliament by addressing her speech against the regressive politics in Russia and claiming that the Russian Duma has regressed back to the days of the Emperor. No reaction has yet been seen from the Russians but I expect it will come soon.

And maybe Lordi for President would not be such a bad idea after all?!?