A few weeks ago I received a surprising message from the Oulu Greens party office. I was asked to stand as a candidate in the municipal elections – and later also in the county elections. Both will be held on 13 April. I had planned to hold an election café with fourth graders that day, but if I ran, I would not be allowed to be at the polling station. After thinking about it for a few days, I decided to run. The others would have to make coffee for the voters in Kaijonharju. I had never thought of getting involved in politics, but the idea quickly took hold of me. In the past couple of weeks, I spent a lot of my free time filling up the different election compasses. So, I’ve been gathering information and trying to form opinions on wind power, wolf culling, emergency rooms, nurse staffing, and so on. Sometimes I feel like I know nothing about anything, but sometimes I’m surprised at how they know how to ask the very things I have been thinking about anyway. A surprising number of questions are about language, language skills and integration in one way or another. YLE has already published their voting compass and you can read my answers here (for the municipal elections) and here (for the county elections).
Secondly, I had to think about what my main goal is for the elections. I decided I want to give a voice to those who find it difficult to participate in decision making (or anything else) because almost everything here is done in Finnish. Go ahead and try to find English (or any other language) information about… say, maternity clinics in Oulu on the Pohde website. Well, no luck – the information is only in Finnish. Some things can be done in English in Oulu, but not much. Let alone in other languages. I want to promote that people should get information in their own mother tongue, that children should learn their own mother tongue in Finnish schools (you can get state aid for this, so it doesn’t even cost the city much), etc. Of course, integration also involves learning Finnish, and that too is often made far too difficult. I also call for equality in recruitment, for example (anonymous recruitment) and other measures to eliminate structural racism.