The 13th president

 

I believe "The 13th president of Finland. I believe Finland now gets a good president for the republic. Alexander Stubb is an experienced, competent person for the job. No more babble." With these words, perennial loser and finalist Pekka Haavisto conceded the second, his fourth, round in a presidential election closely, but not vitriolically fought amidst the cold marking this most northern of republics - bar Iceland - and the tensions between old Suomi and her longtime neighbour rising to new extremes hardly known since the now almost romantic time of war marked by the defence minister's words, that there is space for hundreds of thousands of more Russians, should they choose (or rather he) to cross this frontier now, by his making (or theirs) one with the very close-chested North Atlantic alliance now reaching both frontiers, quite soon I suspect, of smaller Atlantics. With the last ballots counted, the conclusions already drawn from the oft-supreme first round, and remade from the 2018 tally, that Haavisto had lost, and the candidate of unity or unspoken benefit of being everybody's (or close enough) second choice had won, the presidency was - quite historically - restored with a native Swedish speaker for the first time since the Marshal, an era of old, of post-independence now seemingly resurrected in symbology and word as well as in geopolitics. On that note, his words - although not much more popular than this blog - are well considered and enthusiastic and certainly measured to his benefit,