21 found a pragmatic take on doing politics. “People are quick to point out faults, but very few actually do something about the state of things. Nonetheless, I’m a positive person and want to believe that things can change if you do something about them.” Still, the reality of politics scares Huumonen. She admits that she’s naïve. ”I’m afraid that if I dive all into politics, this naïveté would fade. Or maybe sincerity is a better word.” Huumonen got to know the drawbacks of politics when she lead the campaign against MV-lehti, an online publication accused of spreading hate speech and fake news. The readers of the publication threatened and attacked Huumonen as you would expect them to, and machinated the search for her home address. In the end, that only managed to add fuel to the fire of Huumonen’s passion to work for things she finds important. Still, nightmares of real world politics follow Huumonen into her dreams. ”I had a nightmare where I had become a talking robot. I couldn’t speak anything else but jargon, and no one understood me. It was terrible.” In addition to jargon a politician’s everyday life is filled with endless meetings, and handing out campaign posters in freezing sleet. According to Huumonen it’s just as fun as it sounds like. When you’re campaigning you also have to carry the weight of your party’s past on your shoulders. ”Sometimes people scream at me and tell me I’m absolute shit because when SDP’s Lipponen was Prime Minister, he made the pension cuts. Of course there are also a lot of good conversations and nice encounters.” Unlike Huumonen, Hilkka Kemppi, 29, actually enjoys campaigning outdoors. She just ended her term as a chairperson of Finnish Centre Youth, and now she acts as a chair of both Asikkala City Council and State Youth Council. Passion for politics is what keeps her awake at the meetings. ”During meetings I somehow get this feeling that this stuff is important as heck and if I’m not awake now, the whole world will explode. I guess some people would find it hard to understand that when others go out to get wasted, I head to a general assembly. General assemblies are the best.” Kemppi seems to truly believe this. Her CV is filled with positions of trust, and for the past four years politics has been her full-time job. This is also something people find difficult to wrap their heads around. ”When I tell people I’m a politician, some of them still ask me what my actual job is. This is a job as any other, and requires its own set of skills and knowledge. It’s process management, mostly.” You can tell that Kemppi is a professional politician from the way she presents herself. She knows the dangers of speaking out, which makes her answers cautious and calculated. With Laakso and Huumonen I felt like a person talking to another person. Now we are our titles, a politician and a journalist. Combining ideological purity and real politics is not a problem for Kemppi. She didn’t choose her party through theoretical analysis, but very pragmatically: by reading every party’s values
NO