A parliamentary debate on the EU's 750 billion euros Covid recovery plan has been suspended after a marathon 20-hour plenary session that lasted through Wednesday night and into Thursday morning.
The session is scheduled to resume at 8pm on Thursday evening.
MPs from the Finns Party, who are opposed to the package, provided the majority of the speeches throughout the session -- in an attempt to either delay or prevent a vote on the issue. Speeches by Finns Party MPs on occasion included excerpts from the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale as well as the texts of church hymns.
According to news agency STT, the party constantly had at least five MPs in the chamber at any one time throughout the night, who would take it in turns to speak. There was also a consistent backlog of 15 requests for speeches in the queue, the agency reported.
Speaker of Parliament Anu Vehviläinen (Cen) announced the suspension of the session just before 10am due to a meeting of Parliament's Constitutional Law Committee. In total, about 160 speeches were heard before the suspension was called.
A vote on the package had been scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, but was postponed after a plenary session that began at 2pm on Tuesday afternoon ended at 4:24am on Wednesday morning.
Finland's parliament is due to decide on the EU's Covid recovery package and seven-year EU budget framework, which requires a two-thirds majority.
If even one EU member state does not accept the package, the recovery plan will not be rolled out, and the votes of the governing parties alone are not enough to carry the proposal.
The rest of the opposition parties plan to vote against the package, but the pro-Europe National Coalition Party (NCP) leadership has given its MPs free rein to vote as they wish. The party is known to have both supporters and opponents of the package.
