In Spring, when the demagogue-ridden party of the True Finns won the parliamentary elections, the vast majority of Finns who didn’t vote for them were quite shocked. In fairness, it was not the party itself that was the biggest cause of unrest, but the dismal, mysterious gang of racists who had set up shop in the party. This outfit was called Suomen Sisu, or the ‘Pluck of Finland’, and the most notorious of the ‘Plucky’ candidates is Jussi Halla-aho.
Halla-aho is basically a blogger who has spent years abusing Muslims, Africans and the political left, and who has been able to capture quite a following with his online writings. It is possible to call this following a cult or a sect, with his followers worshipping him as if he were a religious idol.
In reality, however, it’s not the racists who brought the election victory to the party, but rather the bout of anti-European sentiment that followed the Greek crisis. Timo Soini, the chairman of the party, always focused on Euroscepticism, and he can hardly be accused of racism.
It is another thing that he behaves rather cynically, noting that he had no problem welcoming racists into his party to attract votes. Soini always used to take advantage of local rabble-rousers in order to make his use of them. If there was a group of people rebelling against ‘government’ and feeling wronged in a particular way, Soini never hesitated to add this kind of basic-level politicisation to his broad church. His was the strategy of looking for spontaneous populist movements that he could domesticate.
It is, however, probable that Soini condemned his party to ruin when he consented to the alliance with the ‘Pluckies’, for they are no spontaneous populist movement. They were more tightly organised than Soini understood them to be. They are not toeing to any party line or paying any attention to Finland’s interests as a nation, and hardly a day passes without them causing some scandal. The biggest one was when Halla-aho publicly stated that Greece would need a military dictatorship and tanks in the streets to teach the protesters and the strikers of the country a lesson.
Of course this utterance went all over the world, because Halla-aho wasn’t just an obscure blogger any more, but a member of the Finnish Parliament, continuously watched by the media. The statement wasn’t really that different from what he had said at earlier occasions, but it was the first time that the whole world heard him: it was reported even by newspapers in Taiwan! It was obviously a horrible insult to the people of Greece, because they were indeed ruled by a brutal military dictatorship in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many Greeks still bear the scars of those years.
Timo Soini was visiting Russia when he heard about what Halla-aho said, and to start with he promised to suspend Halla-aho’s membership of the True Finns for a month as punishment. He even told the media that he would have the group vote on this punishment, so that he would find out who was with him, and who with Halla-aho. But in the end, he was content to split the punishment: Halla-aho was put in quarantine for only two weeks, and there was no vote.
Of course, all the news media interpreted this in such a way that it was just a compromise to keep the party from splitting for another while, and that the leadership of the True Finns was slipping from Soini ¬– that the party might even be in the process of disintegrating – because he didn’t risk the vote after all.
Although many True Finn parliamentarians did make racist or even Fascist noises after the election, it seems now that we are not heading for a tragedy, but a farce. Maybe there is a great recession looming in Finland as well as the rest of Europe, but on the other hand, political jokes will be booming!
Panu Höglund is a Finnish online writer and translator.
