Week-long Finnish pride celebration culminates in massive parade

The pride parade in Helsinki on Saturday was attended by Finnish prime minister Antti Rinne and the first female Finnish bishop, Irja Askola

July 02, 2019 by Peoples Dispatch
Helsinki Pride 2019
Over 100,000 people participated in the march.

On June 29, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Helsinki as part of the Pride Parade 2019. The grand march was the culmination of the week-long pride celebrations. The parade was attended by Finnish prime minister Antti Rinne and the first female Finnish bishop, Irja Askola. According to the organizers of the Helsinki Pride Week, more than 100,000 people participated in the march.

The yle reported that the pride procession started on Saturday at 12 pm from the Senate Square and ended with festivities at the Kaivopuisto park.

The Helsinki pride is a continuation of the ‘Freedom Day,’ which was first organized by Seksuaalinen tasavertaisuus (SETA), one of the major LGBT rights organizations in Finland.

The Communist Party of Finland (SKP) also joined the pride march as the Red Rainbow Bloc. They arranged a red rainbow tent at the Kaivopuisto park, where the march ended. The SKP said that although the name of the celebration had been changed from ‘Freedom Day’ to ‘Pride’, the liberation of gender and sexual minorities from society’s discriminatory structures was yet to be fully achieved.

On June 27, the SKP, the European Left, and the Democratic Education Union organized a discussion on the ‘Need of a Day of Liberation’ involving Marec, the Slovenian Institute for Gender and Sexual Minorities.