Cold Climates

[Huckleberry Finn]

A little Finnish rural-urban perspective...

In Finland we have probably world's strongest rural party: Finnish Centre. It's old farmers party which currently represents interest of all rural people, not only farmers. (Party support goverment's (and EU's) subventions and services from countryside but it is very conservative on environmental issues) Party have quite popular also in small towns. It also has been support by urban people who have rural background.
Normally it gets over 20 percent of vote in national election. In many small farming municipalities it gets over 50 even in even over 70 percent of vote. In our capital Helsinki it gets only 5 percent.

At present it is biggest party and leading one in coalition cabinet (with Social Democrats) after its long opposition period.

In social issues Centre is more conservative than urban right-wing National Coalition Party. (There is only one rural area where Coalition Party has been strongly support) But in the economical issues Finnish Centre is truly centrist party. (In USA surely left liberal)

Right-wing (in USA surely moderate) Coalition Party has been mostly support by urban middle-class voters and entrepreneurs (18-23 % of vote)

Social Democrats' (21-25%) votes come of course from working class and more and more growing middle-class. (If you are middle-class dude with working class background you will often vote for Left) There are some rural areas with forest industry where Social Democrats are fairly popular, but mainly their votes come from cities.

Particular trait in Finnish political landscape is so- called "backwoods Communism." There are lot of  extreme left wing voters (Nowadays in Left Alliance = former communists) in poor rural areas in north (Lapland) and east part of Finland. (without well paid forest industry jobs) Left Alliance also has strong support in industrial cities.  

[Huckleberry Finn]

Realpolitik. Thank for you interest! I found this site for you. There is several maps about Finland and lot of other information about our history, society, economy, nature, way of life etc. All in English.

http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/finnmap.html

I also found maps of elections. But that site wasn't run very good. Also in English.

http://kartat.stat.fi/default_en.html

Finnish language is Finno-Ugrian one like are Hungarian,  Esthonian, Sami's language and several small minoritylanguages in central Russia.

Gustaf. Turkish isn't Finno-Ugrian language. It belongs to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages.

[Huckleberry Finn]

Gustaf. I found this information in website of University of Helsinki.

http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/sugl/fgrlang.html

The Finno-Ugrian or Uralic language family includes a group of languages (mainly) in northern Eurasia. (According to the traditional terminology, Uralic means both main branches of the language family, the Finno-Ugrian and the Samoyedic languages, but some colleagues use "Finno-Ugrian" as a synonym for "Uralic".)

The greatest Finno-Ugrian languages are Hungarian (ca. 14 million speakers), Finnish (ca. 5 million) and Estonian (1 million). Other Finno-Ugrian languages are smaller, practically all of them more or less endangered. (List of Finno-Ugrian languages and speaker statistics.)

Some hypotheses have been made concerning the possible genetic relationship between Uralic and other language families (Altaic, Indo-European or even Basque, for example), but Finnish Uralicists at least take a very reserved attitude towards them.