One of Helsingin Sanomat’s most-read stories on Thursday morning features a Finnish couple who moved to Estonia to grow their business and to start a family — both of which they had been struggling to do in Finland.
“If we had stayed in Finland, we wouldn’t have a child now,” the father of the family, Mikael Hugg, tells HS.
Mikael and his spouse, Maria, first moved from Helsinki to Tallinn about five years ago, attracted by the lower living costs and the opportunity to start their own company. Mikael’s business had been failing in Helsinki, but their joint venture was soon thriving amid the entrepreneurial spirit they found in the Estonian capital.
Once their livelihood was on a stable footing, they turned their attention to their next dream: starting a family.
The couple needed IVF treatment to help them fulfil that dream, but the costs of doing so in Finland at the time were prohibitively high.
Not so in Estonia, however, where over two years of IVF treatment as well as pre-natal care and childbirth cost the couple the grand sum of zero euros.
“And in addition, we received a maternity package from the city of Tallinn and €350 from the Estonian state. The mother is also paid full maternity allowance for 550 days, equal to the monthly salary she earned before becoming pregnant,” Mikael adds.
HS notes that, for Estonia, increasing or maintaining birth rate levels has been a matter of survival. While discussion of the topic in Finland tends to focus on creating future taxpayers, in Estonia there are fears about the future of the nation itself.
Finland, like many other countries in Europe, is facing rapid population decline — with forecasts painting a bleak picture of the future — as many young couples defer or desist from starting a family because of the prevailing economic conditions, or climate change, or even the perceived threat from Russia.
But as HS notes, couples will still have children if the conditions are right.
“That we would put our lives on pause or stop continuing our family line just because Putin is an asshole! That just feels like a really odd reason,” Mikael Hugg says.
Smashed windows raise racism suspicions
Lapin Kansa, Finnish Lapland’s main regional newspaper, reports on the ongoing fallout from an act of vandalism in the city of Rovaniemi earlier this week, in which several taxis had their windows smashed.
One of the taxi drivers affected by the vandalism, Omar Al-Qarttani, noted to the newspaper that only cars that do not belong to local taxi firms were targeted in the attack.
“This shows that it is not random vandalism or an attempted theft,” Al-Qarttani stated.
Although the investigation is still in its early stages, Detective Inspector Pälvi Suokas confirmed that there may be a racial motive behind the acts — as most if not all of the victims of the attacks are taxi drivers of immigrant background, who have moved to Finnish Lapland from the south of Finland for the peak winter season.
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One of the taxis targeted by the vandals in Rovaniemi earlier this week. Image: Antti Mikkola / YleSpring in the air?
Tabloid Iltalehti writes that although Finland will see the coldest temperature of the winter so far on Thursday — when the mercury plunges to minus 41.4 degrees Celsius in the Lapland municipality of Savukoksi — the promise of a warmer-than-usual spring is already on the horizon.
According to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), spring will arrive earlier than usual in Finland this year, and it will be on average about 1-2 degrees warmer too.
Much will depend on the strength and direction of the föhn winds, IL notes, however, which can bring warm, dry, down-slope gusts from the mountains of Norway into Finland — if the conditions so allow.
“If we have more föhn winds than usual, it would mean the spring months will be characterised by mild and warm weather, and possibly sunnier than usual too,” Foreca Meteorologist Joanna Rinne tells the tabloid.
While that’s all well and good, there are still the remains of winter to get through first.
IL writes that Thursday will be sunny across much of Finland, but very chilly too, with temperatures ranging from -15 degrees Celsius in the south to lows of -41 degrees in the far north.
“The sun is really just a decoration, not a heater,” Juha Jantunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute says.