Students protested the government with sticks

Yesterday, Friday 20 August, a group of angry students protested in front of the Government palace in Helsinki against the new budget proposal passed by the Government on Thursday. The students were outraged by the government’s decision to withdraw all improvements in the Finnish student benefit promised to the student unions and still carry on with severe cuts and adding control measures. The protesters had brought sticks and canes with them in order to give them back to the minister of finance Jyrki Katainen, shouting slogans such as: “Where are the Carrots? Nowhere!” and “Cane Katainen!”.

The possibilities for equality in education in Finland have been gradually dismantled over the years. The students feel increasing pressure to take more part-time shit jobs to pay the bills, and new control mechanisms and disciplinary measures have been introduced to “speed up” the graduation. Recently a number of right-wing opinion-leaders have made vehement statements in favour of tuition fees. The last drop was the new budget proposal.

The Finnish government broke its promises to student unions. SU’s had accepted a plan for student benefit reform as a compromise that would include both negative and positive changes. Basically, it would have been a reform to make students graduate faster using both “carrots and sticks”. Now the reform would include only the sticks:

tightening the minimum demand of study credits per month
even more strict rules for receiving housing supplement of the benefit
division of the student benefit in two parts: a certain number of months for bachelor degree, a certain number of months for master degree.

The students marched into the entrance hall of the Government palace where they called for the ministers to come down and discuss their disastrous decisions. None of the ministers showed up, and without making any contact with the protesters, the security staff decided to call the police. After a few minutes of rallying inside, the students went outside again. By the time the police arrived, many demonstrators had already left. The police arrested 16 people who had stayed in the area, and took them to custody for several hours and 13 of them got fines for “disturbing public peace”. The protesters deny all such claims and they are going to appeal against the fines.

The protest action got a lot of attention in the Finnish media. Headlines included “20 protesters attacked the Government palace”. Further protests are likely to be organized…