In September 2024, I gave a presentation in Dresden about struggles against the right-wing government in Finland. Freedom published a text based on that presentation last September, but due to character limitations I had to skip an introduction to the Finnish party system. This background is necessary for understanding the emergence of right-wing populism in Finland and why it was accepted into government.
This column is a prequel, covering the first 17 minutes of the 2024 presentation, which is available on YouTube and on Spotify.
In picture: State treasurer and chairperson of the right-wing populist party Riikka Purra celebrating budget cuts and austerity
The Finnish party system is a variation of the general Northern European system shared by Germany and the Nordic countries. The Finnish constitution, however, differs in some minor respects from the other countries in this group. First, the Finnish president has real power in foreign policy, although this does not make much difference for the scope of this article. More importantly, the Finnish parliament has no electoral threshold, and in the largest electoral district as little as 2.7% of the vote is enough to enter parliament. As a result, the parliament is more fragmented, and governing coalitions are broad and often a mixed bag of ideological opposites.
Unlike the other Nordic countries and Germany, Finland currently does not have a (right-wing) liberal party in parliament. The leading centre-right party, the National Coalition Party (48 out of 200 seats), contains both liberals and conservatives. Originally a party of monarchists, it eventually became a big-tent anti-socialist party. Now a neoliberal party, it is currently the largest in parliament and holds the prime minister’s office. In the European parliament, it is member of the conservative EPP group.
Two other parties are aligned with the liberal group in the European Parliament. The Centre Party (currently 23 seats, its worst result during independence) is primarily an agrarian interest party and has historically been more powerful than other Nordic agrarian parties due to Finland’s slower urbanisation. The Swedish People’s Party (9 seats plus 1 from the Åland Islands), although politically liberal, is first and foremost an interest party for the Swedish-speaking minority and has been keen to join both left-wing and right-wing governments. Like Norway and Sweden, but unlike Germany and Denmark, Finland has a small parliamentary Christian party (5 seats), organised by Pentecostalists and other conservative Christians.
The right-wing populist party Perussuomalaiset is officially called “The Finns” in English and is often referred to in the English-language press as the “True Finns”. A more literal translation would be “Average Finns” or “Ordinary Finns”, or, most literally, “Base Finns”. Its predecessor, the Finnish Rural Party, split from the Centre Party in 1959, when the Centre adopted a pragmatic but brutal policy of abolishing the livelihoods of small peasants. In 1959, there were 382,000 farms in Finland. When Finland joined the EU in 1995, only 98,000 remained. Although Finnish agriculture is the most subsidised in the EU by value added, less than half of those farms have survived free trade within the EU, and today only around 42,000 remain.
This means that the Finnish Rural Party failed to defend its constituents. The party, originally peasant-based, anti-Soviet, and anti-EU, was forced to transform into a typical right-wing populist party, whose main campaign themes are opposition to migration and environmentalism. As the second-largest parliamentary group after the 2023 election, it was given the traditional (though not constitutional) right to nominate the Speaker of Parliament. They chose Jussi Halla-Aho, a former party chair who has been convicted of incitement to hatred. The party’s sole MEP, Sebastian Tynkkynen, has already received three such convictions. Unsurprisingly, one of the party’s political goals is to reduce penalties under hate-speech laws or to abolish them altogether, effectively shielding its own members.
The current opposition parties, besides the Centre Party, are the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the Left Alliance. The Finnish Green Party has been one of the most electorally successful Green parties worldwide, but in recent years it has been in decline due to political polarisation between left and right (the Finnish Greens have been somewhat more right-leaning than other Green parties). The Left Alliance is the descendant of communist front organisations; historically, the Finnish Communist Party was second in size in Europe only to the Italian party, but today its successor polls at around 7–10%.
Government coalitions since the beginning of the endless recession
The three most recent Finnish governments have almost lasted full electoral terms. In 2011, Jyrki Katainen of the neoliberal National Coalition Party formed his “six-pack” government with the Social Democrats, Greens, Left Alliance, Swedish People’s Party, and Christian Democrats. The sole purpose of this rainbow coalition was to block the right-wing populists from power after their first major electoral breakthrough.
In 2015, Juha Sipilä decided to include the right-wing populists in government for the first time since the 1980s in an attempt to neutralise their growth; the third coalition partner was the National Coalition Party. The coalition was nicknamed perskeko (“ass-heap”), based on the initials of the governing parties. Pressures within the coalition led the right-wing populist party to split in 2017, and the government eventually collapsed a few months before the scheduled elections due to its failure to pass legislation enabling fast-track dismissals of employees.
The following governments were led by Antti Rinne and Sanna Marin of the Social Democratic Party (Rinne stepped aside after just half a year due to internal disputes). Their coalition with the Centre Party, Greens, Left Alliance, and Swedish People’s Party was known as “Red ochre” (the traditional label for social democratic–agrarian cooperation) or “Lipstick”, as during a short period all five party leaders were women. Marin lost the 2023 election after the right-wing populists regained support by campaigning against the rising cost of living.
Antti Rautiainen
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