Few studies have focused on detecting emotion in parliamentary corpora, and none have done this for the Finnish parliament. In this paper, this gap is addressed by applying the polarity lexicon–based methodology of a study by Rheault et al. (2016) on speeches in the British Parliament to a Finnish corpus. The findings show an increase in positive sentiment over time. Additionally, the findings indicate that politicians’ emotional states may be impacted by the state of the economy and other major events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.