History

Global warming caused the flow of the Gulf Stream to reverse in 2055, which severely affected the climate of all the Nordic countries. The average temperatures dropped by tens of celsius degrees making most of Finland inhospitable tundra. The Lapland is under permafrost and glaciers have started to form in many of the fells. This caused most of the Finns to abandon their homes in the countryside or Northern cities and move to southernmost cities such as Helsinki. Helsinki was a particularly popular destination because many small scale nuclear power plants had been built there recently. These power plants kept most of the citizens warm and the harbour clear of sea ice even with the new climate. However the sudden influx of people created numerous issues such as housing shortage, unemployment, food crisis and street violence.
Number of international conflicts and other local hardships in the 2040s and 50s caused the productivity of Finland to plummet, driving the cost of living higher while the wages started to decrease. This combined with the high number of retired people, low number of workers and high social security costs made the economy of Finland highly deficit. The political divide caused the government unable to implement big reforms needed to fix the situation. Some smaller fixes were attempted, such as encouraging international immigrants to move into Finland to increase the size of the workforce. But many of these attempts were too late, too small or caused a host of new issues.
In 2061 the city of Helsinki went bankrupt and hastily privatised everything from healthcare to public transport and critical infrastructure such as power plants in an event called Sellsinki. Other cities and the whole state of Finland soon followed. Megacorporations bought these assets from the cities and the state and the government officials hailed them as saviours of Finland. Nowadays the state of Finland mostly provides security in the form of military while megacorporations take care of the rest. The city of Helsinki tries to control urban planning and some other official functions but the city politics are controlled by the megacorporations and the city is merely a puppet of the corps.