Finnish university students protest against education spending cuts
Xinhua, December 2, 2015 Adjust font size:
Finnish university students launched nationwide protests on Tuesday against the governmental proposal to cut education spending, media reported.
About 500 people, most of whom were students from the University of Helsinki, gathered in downtown Helsinki.
The banners held by the demonstrators wrote "Free education", "A free university in a capitalist society is like a lecture hall in a prison", and so on.
A nine-week negotiation in the University of Helsinki ended on Monday, resulting in a reduction of 1,200 jobs in the university for saving up to 86 million euros by 2019.
The redundancies will be implemented after the middle of January 2016, said the Finnish national broadcaster Yle.
The decision triggered nationwide demonstrations against the austerity measures in the field of education.
Strikes and demonstrations against the governmental plan to cut education budget were held in many other places across Finland, including Turku, Tampere, Jyvaskyla and Joensuu.
The Finnish government has planned to cut education expenditure by 800 million euros in the current parliamentary term from 2015 to 2019. The spending cuts will involve the whole range of education, in which the slash in the higher education will be a total of 200 million euros. Endit