Finland will elect 292 local councils and 21 wellbeing services county councils this April, and anyone aged over 18 and resident for more than two years in Finland is eligible to vote.
Historically, those with foreign backgrounds have been less active in voting and participating in politics in Finland, but this week APN speaks to people looking to change that.
Ran Blumgrund, of the Familia association for intercultural families, told us that election time is like his 'birthday', as he gets to join the celebration of democracy with everyone else.
"You can come and talk about things that bother you," Blumgrund explains about meeting candidates at election events. "Many of them are surprised and excited about the fact that a person tries to speak to them in a language that is not Finnish. If you try to speak to them in English, most of them will be very excited about that, and you can really have an influence."
Listen to the episode via this embedded player, on Yle Areena, via Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
We also met some candidates with foreign backgrounds who are running in the election, including Georgios Karhu-Jopasin, who's campaigning on the Social Democrat ticket in Tampere.
"What really drove me into this right now is that last autumn, I really felt that I couldn't sit on the sidelines with so many local issues I encountered in my daily day job working in the employment office of Tampere," Karhu-Jopasin tells APN.
We also asked Hiva Khedri of the Greens and Masoumeh Salimi from the National Coalition Party about their reasons for standing as candidates.
While wrapping up the rest of the week's news, we hear from Jonathon Murphy of International House Turku about the demonym 'Turkunian', which prompted some debate when we used it in a headline on Tuesday.
He notes that he had always used the Finnish term 'Turkulainen', to reflect the former capital's strong identity as distinct from other regions.
"In that sense maybe it makes sense that Turkulainen has been this kind of untranslatable term but of course if you don't speak Finnish, if you're a newcomer here then perhaps it's not that accessible," Murphy says. "So maybe it's time to think about how we would translate that and to my mind as a speaker of British English, Turkunian to me makes sense."
Join the conversation!
Egan Richardson and Ronan Browne presented this episode of All Points North. The sound engineer was Juha Hjelm.
If you have any questions or want to share your thoughts, contact us via WhatsApp at +358 44 421 0909 or at [email protected] and [email protected].
Users with an Yle ID can leave comments on our news stories. You can create your Yle ID via this link. Our guidelines on commenting and moderation are explained here.
