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OUTCRY AS COMMITTEE REPORT ALLEGES NORSE MISMANAGEMENT OF KVEN PEOPLE

^{HEAVY WORDS WITH LIGHT EVIDENCE
FINLAND—SUMMER 2025}

Though the Finnish Parliament is not in session during the months of July and August, the Finnish Committee of Cultural Survival continued work in the off-season at the encouragement of Prime Minister Orpo, surveying the intense array of cultural programs set in place in the spring and examining room for new ones. Such work, pursuing the Committee's purpose of enriching and protecting the cultures of the Finno-Ugric people of northern Europe, would ordinarily be routine. One report of the Committee, however, stirred controversy on its release to the Committee's website in late August. "The Germanophilic government on Finland's north border," opened a key section of the publication, "has not only neglected but truly shunned the agreements reached between Finland and its neighbor state in the spring." Though not citing any evidence besides "international observers in Finnmark", the Committee stated that Finno-Ugric culture is "thoroughly assailed" in the Kingdom of Norr and suggested immediate "action" on behalf of the Finno-Ugric—particularly the Kven—people there.

Reactions to the statement came quickly. Sanna Marin of the Social Democrats decried the statement, claiming that the "radicals of the Committee" had flimsy concrete evidence of the mismanagement of the Finno-Ugric peoples it alleged. Marin was in an unfortunate minority, however—the report seemed to be widely held as credible due to the perceived infallibility of government sources. Marin and her Social Democratic party-fellows were quick to question who could have allowed or encouraged such a document to be composed, and what fact-checkers had authorized its release—such questions pervaded much of social media. Much more attractive to the lethargic voter, though, was the fiery rhetoric of Finns Party demagogue Alvi Karvonen, who immediately siezed on the opportunity for another radical statement: that the Finno-Ugric people of Norr were so thoroughly mismanaged that authority over them should be granted to the Finnish Republic outright.

"Why should innocent brethren be left under the uncaring eye of a far-flung Kingdom? Why must we watch as Finno-Ugrians—our cousins, we must remember—watch their language, their culture, falter into nonexistence under the boot of national conformity in Norr? I do not think we should," Karvonen declared in a video spread through right-wing social media groups. Finns Party members began to label the Kven people of Norr "our abandoned cousins" by the end of August, and, powerless to stop it, President Kai Mykkänen—head of state of one of the world's most stable, happy democracies—had to watch as political infighting heightened. It is true—not all Finns find themselves consumed by the heated debates that now fill Finland's political spheres. However, increasing weight now rests on Mykkänen's upcoming "anti-reactionary" speaking tour of Finland, which he was gambling would help to stop or reverse the encroaching influence of the Finns Party in Finland.