The President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, arrived in Dar es Salaam on May 14, 2025, for a three-day state visit. In a joint press conference, President Samia Suluhu Hassan noted that the two leaders had held discussions covering a wide range of topics, including mining, trade, tourism, education, and both regional and global issues. She also highlighted Tanzania’s proposal to establish a platform of cooperation between the two countries’ parliaments.

President Stubb, who is accompanied by a delegation of 10 businesspeople, also briefed the press on key areas of discussion, including climate change, gender equality, and shifts in the global order. The shift in global order has remained one of President Stubb’s main agendas in both Kenya and Tanzania, highlighting the concern and effort to reach out to African leaders in building a common position in response to shifting global dynamics.

“Looking at this shift for the better part of five to ten years, the question is, will it tilt towards a multipolar transaction world, which we’re seeing right now, or more towards a multilateral world of cooperation? And I think countries like Tanzania have such a big say in this,” Stubb said during a joint press conference with President Samia.

“In our discussions, it became clear that our shared objective is not only to have good bilateral relations,” Stubb explained, “but it’s to work together to maintain the international order, and our objective is to develop that further and better reflect the African continent’s growing global significance.”

In a series of discussions held in Nairobi, President Stubb analyzed that the world is going through a period of disorder, before order, similar to changes observed in 1918, 1945, and 1989. He explained that the period of disorder might take about five to ten years before the new world order sets in. He explained that with the demographic shift in the world, countries in the global south have an opportunity to influence the direction of the world.

“And right now, we’re also in an interesting sort of change that we’re going back to big power, not conflict necessarily, but tension. And that means that we might be going back to some kind of concert of powers as we had in the 1800s, you know, when you have big players such as the United States, Russia, China, sort of perhaps wanting to split up or divide the world a little bit,” Stubb argued during an interview with Citizen TV in Kenya on May 13, 2025

“…We want to go back and try to make sure that this doesn’t happen,” he continued. “So, I think the choice essentially is between multipolar disorder, so everyone for themselves, dog eats dog, and multilateral cooperation. And I want this multilateral cooperation to take place because that’s when the world, in my mind at least, is more just, even for a small guy.”

In the discussion with the Tanzanian president, Stubb also reflected on the vacuum left in the United Nations structures and maintained that there is a need to change the power structure to reflect the realities of today’s world. Using the experience of the Russia-Ukraine war, President Stubb emphasized the importance of having multilateral institutions mediate peace.

One of the key solutions that Stubb advocates during an interview with Citizen TV is to move away from the current trend of veto and only a few players with permanent membership at the UN Security Council.

“If we want to preserve the multilateral world, so the UN, you have to give agency to the countries that don’t feel like they have agency. So why do you have a Security Council which is based on the winners of World War II and veto power?” he asked during the interview.

“That’s why I suggested in speech in the UN in September that the composition of the Security Council should be doubled from 5 to 10, and we should have at least one from Latin America, two from Africa, and two from Asia, and then Europeans can sort themselves out because essentially, we have three places, right? The UK, France, and Russia. If we want the UN to be the center of peace as an institution, then everyone has to have a say,” he emphasized.

Tanzania and many African countries have been pushing for reforms in the UN Security Council, calls which have not borne fruit to date.

President Stubb is expected to participate in an event today, May 15, 2025, revisiting the legacy of President Martti Ahtisaari at the Julius Nyerere Conference Center, and he will also attend the UNDP innovation seminar as well as visit the National Museum. President Stubb is also expected to launch the Forestry, Land Use, and Value Chains Development in Tanzania (FORLAND) program on May 16.