Finnish-French MEP criticise Finnish President and Foreign Minister

Friday, February 25, 2005

Paris, Helsinki — The former Finnish rally driver and current Member of the European Parliament for Grand Sud-Est France, Ari Vatanen, harshly criticised Finnish President Tarja Halonen and the current Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja for having an anti-American stance and maintaining old-fashioned ideologies about defence strategies that hark back to the 1970s, in an article in the Wall Street Journal Europe.

The UMP member, born in Finland, said that considering that 94% of the nations in the EU are NATO members, it does not make sense for Finland to not join.

According to Vatanen, when the MEP first tried publish the piece in the Helsingin Sanomat, the newspaper refused to publish it.

Accondingly Helsingin Sanomat, 57% of Finns are against joining NATO, while 23% are in favour.

Helsingin Sanomat is the main newspaper of Finland and the biggest daily subscription-based newspaper in Scandinavia. The paper is independent and non-aligned.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Sources

Helsingin Sanomat. "Clear majority of Finns still opposed to NATO membership" — Helsingin Sanomat, February 28, 2005
Finnpundit Published under the February 23, 2005 {{{name}}}, February 23, 2005
"Vatanen Criticises Finnish Leaders" — YLE, February 22, 2005

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License