Racism and rape fantasies: The public relations conundrum facing Finland’s new right-wing government

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The new economy minister spoke at a rally organized by neo-Nazis, while the Speaker of Parliament has a decades-long record of race-related court convictions and deeply disturbing blog posts.

As Finland’s new coalition government takes office on Tuesday, new Prime Minister Petteri Orpo faces a public relations headache over the Speaker of Parliament and the Minister for Economic Affairs, two posts held by the party of Finnish extreme right.

In Finland, it’s no secret that Jussi Halla-aho, a former Finnish party leader, former MEP and now in a high-level position as Speaker of the House, has a history of racist comments for decades. decades and deeply disturbing writings. .

The blog posts, written years before he was in the public eye, contain disturbing insights into the worldview that shaped his politics, and even earned him convictions for “religious worship disorder” and ” ethnic unrest” for which he was fined by the Finn. Supreme Court.

Among hundreds of blog posts over the years, Halla-aho wrote in June 2006 that Islam is a “religion of paedophiles” and that the Prophet Muhammad “was a paedophile”.

He said “robbing passers-by” was a “genetic trait” of Somalis.

In 2006 he hinted that he would be “exclusively happy if an ‘immigrant gang’ raped” a Green Party MP.

“I still believe and will continue to sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that if a woman who opposes the deportation of immigrant rapists is raped by an immigrant rapist, that is a happy thing,” he wrote. later.

Halla-aho also targeted Finland’s LGBTQ+ community.

“Violence is an underrated problem-solving tool today,” he wrote in November 2008, when discussing the murder of a gay man in Helsinki.

A Finnish court has ordered some of the more egregious comments deleted, while others have been deleted by the author, but many more can still be found online.

Halla-aho never apologized for his early writings.

“Their whole modus operandi is always to attack, never defend, never ask for forgiveness,” Oula Silvennoinen, associate professor at the University of Helsinki, told Euronews.

For several years, Halla-aho was an open member of a nationalist organization called Suomen Sisu, which opposes immigration and multiculturalism and takes an anti-EU stance. A number of senior Finnish Party politicians have also been members of Suomen Sisu.

Can a convinced person in Finland still stand for parliamentary elections?

There is no law in Finland that says a person with beliefs against them cannot be a member of parliament, or even president.

Article 31 of the Finnish constitution contains a vague rule that “a representative shall conduct himself with dignity and propriety, and not behave offensively towards another person”, which applies not only to rank-and-file MPs, but to the Speaker of Parliament and government ministers as well.

However, the Finnish political system is based on the premise that an MP has already received a mandate from the voters, and that matters a lot, so no other checks or balances are provided.

In response to a request for comment, the Finnish party told Euronews that Halla-aho “is one of Finland’s most esteemed politicians.”

However, Party Secretary Arto Luukkanen said that “your information regarding Finnish politics is not appropriate and does not correspond to the realities of life. Relying on biased sources is a typical ‘rookie mistake’ ( sic), both in journalism and in historiography (sic).” he added.

Halla-aho’s court convictions are public knowledge in Finland, hundreds of his old blog posts are still online and can be checked, and the issues have been widely documented in Finnish media over the years.

When asked by Finnish journalists about his writings, Halla-aho’s usual response is to say they’re old, and he doesn’t bring them up, it’s the media’s choice to keep going back and rehashing old stuff. texts.

The minister spoke at a rally organized by neo-Nazis

Another headache facing Finland’s new government is Economic Affairs Minister Vilhelm Junnila, who holds the post for the first two years and then trades with another Finnish Party colleague.

In 2019 Junnila was the guest speaker at an event in the western city of Turku which was apparently meant to commemorate a terrorist attack two years prior.

However, the rally was organized by an organization called the Coalition of Nationalists, an umbrella group formed in 2017 for those on the far right, including the Finnish Party, the now-banned Nordic Resistance Movement and the Self-Defense Movement of soldiers of Odin.

Already in the spring of the same year, the Coalition of Nationalists had made headlines in Finland after being denounced for having organized shooting training in a camp in the forest, where the targets were faces of Finnish government ministers.

The event where Junnila spoke was a “who’s who of neo-Nazis in Finland”, according to one researcher, and members of these various shadowy far-right organizations can be seen in photographs standing behind Junnila as he gave a brief speech, albeit on the opposite bank.

Junnila was “the pre-announced official speaker” of the event, writes Panu Raatikainen, professor of philosophy at the University of Tampere.

Euronews has contacted incoming Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s National Coalition Party for comment on the new government.

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