Timo Soini and the ‘cowardly’ journalists of Finland
Towards the end of February an extraordinary news item went from user to user in Finnish social media: Timo Soini, the chairman of the True Finns party, had been interviewed by BBC. Lots of us in Finland who aren’t happy with the racism of the extremist faction in Soini’s party have been attacked by them for years, with clearly illegal death threats raining on us from these neo-Nazis, and frustration and anger have been building up because of the reluctance of Finnish mass media to duly highlight this side of the True Finns success story. We were thus quite relieved to see how Soini was treated by journalists in the big world outside Finland: they would not buy his bull the way Finnish journalists do.
Soini’s image in Finnish mass media is that of a frankly speaking country lad, but this image is just a creation of his own spin doctors. Actually he is an educated political scientist married to a doctor. He wrote his graduate thesis about populism in Finnish politics, especially about Veikko Vennamo, the great populist of post-WW2 Finland. When he became the leader of the party once founded by Vennamo (the Party of Rural Finland), which he promptly renamed True Finns (although the original Finnish sounds more like ‘Basic Finns’ or ‘Regular Finns’) you could say that it amounted to a political scientific experiment with people.
This image is so profoundly phony that it is difficult to understand how reluctant Finnish journalists are to criticise it. Of course, it must be admitted that True Finns have become media sexy only relatively recently. The party was earlier only moderately successful, usually with only two or three MPs voted in. Consequently, journalists didn’t bother to write about them. In fact they seemed to have a rather friendly and humorous attitude to Soini – he was seen as a harmless jokester, and many even tended to praise him for protecting the country against the onslaught of racism visible in other European countries. Usually he was seen as a homespun populist, not dangerous to anyone.
The massive victory of the party in the parliamentary election of Spring 2011 surprised journalists, although it had been obvious for some time that True Finns were turning into a political force to be reckoned with. They had no idea of the racist race that had been running wild on the Finnish internet and taking over the True Finns party from the inside. Although lots of racists had been voted in together with Soini, journalists kept on repeating that Soini himself was no racist.
As regards extremists in the party, one of them called Somalis ”human garbage from the Horn of Africa” on his blog, also implying that they were all rapists. At the same time, he said that he ”would be only happy” if one of them raped a certain female politician of the Green Party. This woman, whom the blogger mentioned by name, had been voted in just once and has never been particularly influential in Finnish politics, but obviously the ”crime” that merited ”punishment” was her sex and her membership of that particular party. It is hardly possible not to see the statement as indicative of racist and women-hating attitudes. And this blogger has quite a following, too.
Journalists did understand, basically, that True Finns henceforth had to be taken seriously even in political journalism. This, however, implied that journalists had to make apologies and find excuses in order to show understanding of the statements of the politicians of the party and to defend them, even where those statements were obviously contrary both to the constitution of Finland and to human rights. Journalists were not courageous enough to call a Nazi a Nazi, or a racist a racist.
Maybe this was simply due to pure fear. Racists tend to try to make life unbearable for all those they consider their enemies – to try to tarnish their reputation by researching into their lives so as to find something that could be used against them. Not everybody can put up with these sorts of smear campaigns, especially if they are comfortable middle class people such as most journalists are.
Panu Höglund is an Irish speaker from Finland currently translating a number of books from English into Irish.
