The Great Nordic Thread

[mubar]

On Friday 28th November the Finnish parliament will (finally) vote on equal marriage.

Here's a summary from Yle on the developments around the citizens' initiative and the prolonged handling in the parliamentary committee, that finally allows the full parliament to decide on the issue.

Helsingin Sanomat has a detailed analysis (in Finnish) on individual MPs opinions. According to them, of the 199 voting-eligible MPs almost half, 96 are publicly known to be supporters of equal marriage rights, while 89 oppose and 14 haven't declared their voting intentions. Therefore getting the majority for the initiative is likely, though unfortunately not certain.

This is not the final vote, because if and when it passes there will be yet one more committee round (but different committee this time) and after that one more full session vote. However tomorrow's vote will be the decisive one, as it will reveal all MPs' stances, and the following committee round and final vote would then just confirm it.

Voting is expected to start after 1pm Finnish time (noon Central European time) on Friday.

[mubar]

On Friday 28th November the Finnish parliament will (finally) vote on equal marriage.

And they voted for equal marriage, by 105-92. This margin is more than expected, and will hold also in the later vote after the final committee round, so this is it now for Finland. Finally we join the other Nordic countries in promoting equality in our laws.

Interestingly, Helsingin Sanomat got several names wrong in their pre-vote analysis. They even had listed some MP as supporter, who actually voted against the initiative today. For the most part though, the MPs who hadn't revealed their stance before now voted for same-sex marriage approval.

[mubar]

To our Finnish posters: Will gay marriage automatically become legal on Åland when it does in the rest of Finland or do their parliament have to approve it separately?

It will become legal on Åland automatically with the rest of Finland. The autonomy law of Åland keeps marriage and all family matters as a state issue (5 kap 27 §), with the exception of some inheritance matters. The parliament of Åland will just make sure that none of their property and inheritance laws are affected, before the equal marriage is in force. As Gustaf correctly assumed, Åland is more liberal than Finland in general, they certainly have no problem with applying this law.

Well, most of them. The Faroe Islands are still holding out. So you guys weren't the last.

That's interesting, it means that the Faroe Islands are both more conservative than Denmark, and have full autonomy in marriage and family matters too, am I correct?

Though, the thing is that while gay marriage now passed the Finnish parliament, it will actually become legal only after the other laws it affects are changed also. This will happen only after the April 2015 elections and will have to be done by the new government elected then. If they work fast, we will have our first gay weddings in 2016, but in case of the new govt purposefully slowing down the process, it may take as far as until 1st of March 2017, before gay marriage is actually in force in Finland So... if the Faroe Islands now decide to do it too and work fast, they might still beat us.