Barely two weeks since being sworn into office, Finland’s new coalition government is reeling from a string of controversies that have shone a spotlight on the prevalence of far-right ideology within one of its key players.
The scandals surrounding the anti-immigration Finns Party – from one minister casually firing off jokes about Nazi phrases and KKK snowmen, to another repeatedly invoking the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory – have already triggered the resignation of Economic Affairs Minister Vilhelm Junnila, and led to calls for another minister to follow suit.
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Experts say the tensions are far from resolved, creating a clear schism between the Finns Party and its coalition partners, which has the potential yet to ultimately unravel the new government led by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.
“It is clear that the resignation of Junnila… is going to be a temporary relief at best, as there are more general tensions inside the government coalition,” Riku Löf, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, told VICE News, adding that future disputes were likely.
Critics say the scandals exposed the real nature of Finland’s second most-powerful party, and raised serious questions about their fitness to govern. The party is widely described by political scientists as belonging to the radical right, but has managed to successfully moderate its public image enough in recent years to narrowly finish second in April’s elections, winning 20.1 percent of the vote, its best-ever result. It also gained 7 of 19 ministerial posts.
“It seems that many people in Finland have had a naïve image of the Finns Party and their ideological connections to the far-right extremist ideas,” said Löf. “Some people have seen them as a softer version of the radical right-wing parties in Europe, an illusion which is now quickly being shattered.”
The trouble began when Vilhelm Junnila, appointed minister of economic affairs last month, came under intense scrutiny for his familiarity with right-wing extremism. This included a history of “playfully” invoking white supremacist ideology, including jokes referencing the Nazi slogan “Heil Hitler,” and social media posts of noose-wielding Klansmen snowmen, as well as actually appearing alongside neo-Nazis, including the since-banned Nordic Resistance Movement, at a far-right event in 2019.
After narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence – in which most of the MPs from one coalition partner voted against him – Junnila, who had tried to downplay his remarks as “silly and childish” jokes, eventually resigned. His replacement as economic affairs minister, fellow Finns Party MP Wille Rydman, is himself no stranger to controversy, having faced allegations of having harassed and had inappropriate relationships with young women and girls.
Rydman denied the claims, which were brought to light by newspaper Helsingen Sanomat last year, when he still represented Orpo’s National Coalition party. While the allegations triggered a preliminary police investigation, no charges were laid, although Orpo said the matter had led to a lack of trust in Rydman, who soon subsequently defected to the Finns Party.
But no sooner had Junnila departed than the spotlight shifted to Mari Rantanen, a fellow Finns Party MP who is the country’s new Interior Minister.
Finnish media reported that Rantanen has made at least three tweets using the phrase “väestönvaihto” – a Finnish term which translates to “population exchange,” and which Löf said was a phrase generally used in Finnish far-right circles when referring to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
Amid growing scrutiny, Rantanen, backed by Finns Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Riikka Purra, insisted that the comments had nothing to do with conspiracy theories.
“I don’t believe in conspiracies. I don’t believe in the population replacement theory either. I believe in numbers and statistics,” Rantanen tweeted Sunday.
But Löf, along with other researchers, said that that excuse strained credulity, and that Rantanen appeared to be using the term väestönvaiho “very consistently and deliberately.”
He pointed to a tweet by Rantanen in February 2021 which was hashtagged with the phrase: “At this rate, before the end of the century, Europe will be part of Africa unless things and policies change. But then again, some people might want that.”
Löf said that the tweet clearly showed that Rantanen was using the term “in a sense that there is a conspiratory group of people or elites, who are somehow responsible for the ‘replacement’,” ignoring other factors that might be driving migration.
He said the tweet echoed familiar rhetoric by far-right politicians which sought to whip up fear and hostility towards migrants among voters, while functioning as a “dog-whistle” to the far-right section of their base which already recognised the terms. Rantanen had also sent other xenophobic tweets, including one in 2020 that featured a photo of six women in burqas in front of Santa Claus, with the statement: “[Former Finland Prime Minister] Sanna Marin’s government wishes you Merry Christmas.”
“It seems the Finns Party is trying to balance between these extremist neofascist segments of their electorate as well as the more moderate voters that shun the extremist views,” said Löf.
He said that Rantanen’s references to the Great Replacement theory was particularly concerning because as Interior Minister, she oversees the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service, which has previously expressed concerns over the influence of the conspiracy theory within the Finnish far-right, and its role in driving acts of terrorism abroad.
Overall, commentators say, the saga points to a rocky path ahead for the new right-wing coalition. They say the episode has created bad blood between the Finns Party and their three coalition partners, and weakened trust within the governing coalition. While Prime Minister Orpo chided Junnila ahead of his resignation, saying the episode should serve as “a very serious warning” to him, and most of the Swedish People’s Party of Finland, one of the Finns Party’s coalition partners, voted him in a confidence vote, the Finns Party leadership did not denounce Junnila, and has steadfastly defended Rantanen.
Commentators say the scandals have weakened trust and created bad blood within the coalition, with “the ideological tensions between the Finns and the more moderate coalition partners now becoming more visible,” said Lof.
These tensions were only likely to become more pronounced, due to the peculiar ideological makeup of the coalition, said Hanna Wass, vice-dean of the social science faculty at the University of Helsinki.
She said the coalition had been formed with a shared focus around economic concerns, with an emphasis on austerity, fiscal conservatism and social security reforms. She said Orpo’s conservative National Coalition had initially been willing to “put up with” the Finns Party, “knowing that the current coalition is the only viable option to implement such an agenda.” That’s expected to be a hard sell for the poorer people in the Finns Party’s support base, so it’s likely that they’ll stir up issues around immigration to try to distract from that, he said.
“[Orpo’s party] might have underestimated this capacity and thought that the Finns Party would ‘behave’ once in government,” she told VICE News.
Löf said that in 2017, Orpo had ruled out any cooperation with the Finns Party, deeming them too extremist, but that ahead of the 2023 elections, he had reconsidered that stance, saying that party had clearly made efforts to moderate themselves. On the evidence of his government’s first weeks in power, he might be rethinking that position.
