There was an election in Finland last weekend, for the President; and a selection, for our 2024 Eurovision entrant. After the weekend I had some thoughts about masculinities, and ChaChaCha… When Käärijä, Finland’s Eurovision star in 2023, won the right to represent Finland on the glitteriest of European stages, I felt that it told me something important about Finnish men. Perhaps we had moved on from our sadness.

Anyone my age and over in Finland knew one of those men who succumbed to “the Finnish disease”: alcoholism, and knew the trails of loss and violence that they left behind. We also knew the others, the men who had defended and rebuilt the country, built families and oh, just built, and built, often silently, and they never talked about war-things. 

Käärijä was a sign to me that our men don’t any more have to be one of those two types from my childhood: sad-angry-drunk or building-responsible-sober. They can be shy, flamboyant, geeky with a crazy party side that loves pina colada. Käärijä has his nails done at the same salon chain as me. He turned up to sing to children at the President’s Independence Day celebrations. He is beloved but entirely on his own terms. He is absolutely a win for positive masculinity. He won the popular vote at Eurovision but not the jury vote – the juries went for something they recognised. But we just love him harder for that, in Finland, because we know about disappointment.

This year’s Finnish entrant was chosen at the Saturday Finnish selection vote in the same weekend as the Presidential election. Windows95Man, Finland’s elected representative to Eurovision is much less artistic to my taste (the denim thong is actually gross), but it is an act poised in a very Finnish mood between pain and comedy. Few people know how bad the economic depression was in Finland in the early 1990s, about the personal bankruptcies and the suicides. Windows95Man is a homage to the tech nerds who put Finland back on a path to recovery from that crisis. It’s a very niche celebration of a certain kind of (mostly) man that I think will be lost on the rest of Europe.

The other election in Finland last weekend was for the President, and a run-off between two white liberal men. I detected something in the way certain men talked about Alex Stubb having a “British Lawyer Wife” – why? Because she sounds like a trophy wife for cosmopolitan businessmen? Or to draw a subtle comparison to Haavisto and his Ecuadorean hairdresser husband? What are we supposed to be noticing here? 

The tall, groomed and confident Stubb won, but perhaps to his own silent regret as a dedicated cosmopolitan, won most outstandingly in the small towns and rural areas, sweeping the board in the religious revivalist areas, while Haavisto took the big cities. But if there was regret, it was silent indeed, Stubb seemed comfortable harvesting the homophobic vote. 

So in 2024 we are sending a crisis hangover to Europe’s biggest and campest music party; while in formal politics we see again that certain ways of being a man are still not tolerable for a large number of Finns. Hopefully we have a President who will keep the country at peace, which we can only do by being united and well defended. But hopefully he can also overcome having been silent on what I suspect to be his true values, otherwise what does that say about how and why he fights…? Is he only ambitious or is he a responsible state-builder?

But after the voting is all done and disappointment becomes memory, we still have ChaChaCha and I am grateful for that.