“Like Penguins in a Storm”

The Finns Party was the real winner of the election. In general terms, its campaign was anti-immigrant, anti-left, and Eurosceptic. But in a day-to-day sense it hedged on every conceivable issue. Candidates in particular regions would state a position, only for it to be half-denied by the leadership. The leadership itself changed policies multiple times mid-election. Its approach was to try to be everything to everyone, within the confines of right-wing populism.

The Finns lifted their playbook straight from the US Republicans. They dog-whistled to the most extreme racists, and weaponized nonsense culture-war topics like “gender ideology in schools.” They accused public school teachers — whom they associate with the Greens and the Left Alliance — of censorship, while simultaneously campaigning to end feminism in universities and vegetarian food in school canteens. While the Finns boasted elected representatives like Teuvo Hakkarainen and fielded candidates like Wille Rydman — both accused of sleaziness involving children — their supporters ran a terror campaign lodging false complaints of child abuse against progressive activists.

Current leader Riikka Purra has played the victim throughout all this. She described the Finns Party as “huddling like penguins in a storm” while the other parties unfairly accuse it of flirting with Nazism. She had demanded that outgoing prime minister Marin apologize when she called a potential NCP-Finns government a “blue-black” coalition, making implicit reference to the Finnish fascist movement that violently terrorized the Left in the 1930s.

But the accusation is entirely fair. The youth wing of the Finns Party formed a stooge party during this election literally called the Blue-Black Movement (Sinimusta Liike). The party’s program was so extreme — including blatant antisemitism, banning the promotion of non-heterosexuality, and calling for a register of ethnic minorities — that it was forced to delete most of it to legally register as a political party. It then took advantage of a legal loophole to put all of the content back into its election propaganda. Its candidates included an attempted murderer who stabbed a nineteen-year-old almost to death and blamed his victim’s ethnicity. Sinimusta Liike polled poorly on election day, but it served its intended purpose of making the Finns Party look far less extreme.

The Finns Party has also campaigned against the banning of the swastika — just as the symbol has made a return to the streets of Finland during national day parades.

The Black Courts the Blue

The Finns Party openly courted the NCP, particularly toward the end of the election campaign. A key example is the “competitiveness agreement” that the Finns Party helped establish during its last time in government in 2016, when the NCP was in charge of the Ministry of Finance. This resurfaced as a key 2023 election issue. The agreement froze wages, extended working hours, and partially shifted mandatory social security costs to workers rather than employers. It is estimated that the agreement has so far cost Finnish workers €11.3 billion. While the Finns Party implied throughout its campaign that it was in favor of transferring some costs back to employers, it changed its tune at the eleventh hour.

The Finns were also deliberately evasive about tax cuts, with Purra feigning uncertainty about “where to cut expenses” during a televised leaders’ debate, and arguing that tax cuts were not about cost-of-living issues but “increasing economic dynamism.” If that wink to the NCP wasn’t clear enough, Purra insisted during the debate that,

We have to think about each other as being in the same boat. The Finns Party doesn’t put people into the siloes of class struggle, where the entrepreneur and the employee are against each other. The success of both promotes the common good.

How flattered the NCP is remains to be seen. There are some clear points of irritation. The Finns’ not-so-subtle racism has created a headache for the NCP. The weekend before the election, a crazed antisemite, ranting about a Jewish takeover of Finland, physically attacked NCP politician Ben Zyskowicz while he was campaigning. Physical violence against politicians is relatively rare in Finland, and the nation was temporarily fixated. An annoyed Orpo was forced to focus on condemning racism alongside Marin instead of attacking her.

Finland also has an aging population, and if there’s one thing the NCP knows it’s that capitalists need workers — particularly nonunionized ones. Orpo criticized the Finns Party during the election campaign for its “plagues of Egypt”–style depiction of migrant workers, sneering that,

The only thing missing is the locusts. I would like to hear your solution sometime. . . . you only see problems with work-related immigration, but you have no solution for who will take care of the elderly and who will build the ships at the Turku shipyard.

Orpo also seems to have little patience for the Finns’ more general anti-EU theatrics. He contended that with the Finns Party’s “ridiculous” defense of Polish and Hungarian governments’ recent power grabs (illegal under EU law), the party “has embarked on a dangerous path that ends with totalitarianism.”

The NCP has positioned itself as a patrician-like steward of Finland in dangerous times. While Marin’s government dealt with the awkward logistics of getting Finland into NATO, the NCP will reap the benefits. It has been perhaps the longest mainstream advocate of Finnish entry into NATO, and successfully ran three prominent army figures in this election to draw attention to its defense credentials.

As potential government partners for the NCP, the Finns are a total embarrassment on this front. While they have played down their support for Vladimir Putin, glimpses of their admiration surface periodically. One of their MPs, Juho Eerola, argued against sanctioning Putin for annexing Crimea on the basis that the Russian annexation of Karelia (formerly part of Finland) stimulated trade. Another, Laura Huhtasaari, has spoken admiringly of Putin in the past, and even gone as far as to suggest that “nobody can help Finland, if Putin wants it.” Both were comfortably reelected on Sunday.

Purra and the real power behind the Finns Party throne, Jussi Halla-aho, seem to understand that, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this sort of tomfoolery no longer flies. During the election campaign they have desperately tried to downplay the party’s links to Putin in a bid for respectability.

Annoying as the Finns may be for Orpo, however, the real question is whether they can cooperate on his key priorities to come: cutting taxes for the rich and slashing social spending. Despite their chaotic campaign messaging, the Finns have given every indication that they can and will.

“A Full Noise in the Parliament”

The outgoing government was a coalition of very different parties — from conservatives to anti-capitalists. The Social Democrats were in charge, with the conservatives a kind of deputy, and the smaller coalition partners like the Greens and the Left Alliance taking the lead of smaller ministries like Environment and Education. In part this cooperation was based on keeping the Finns Party out of government.

But from its inception, this coalition contained a fatal contradiction: the second-largest party was the leader of the previous right-wing coalition government. In essence, all the coalition partners agreed to give the Ministry of Finance to the very group whose economic agenda they had just spent three years campaigning against.

This left them understandably open to attacks from conservatives that they were all talk and no action. If the SDP and the Left Alliance were so passionate about transferring social security costs back to employers, the NCP and media commentators asked, why didn’t they do it during their last three-and-a-half years in power?

Greens leader and outgoing environment minister Maria Ohisalo seemed to accidentally reinforce this accusation in her concession speech on Sunday. She promised that “we are going to make a full noise in the parliament. With a smaller group, but with a hell of a lot more energy.” One imagines that her supporters would have hoped for the maximum extension of energy while the party actually held power in the Ministry of the Environment.

The Left Alliance lost five of its sixteen seats. The party had some principled moments during its time in power. Left Alliance representatives were the only party MPs in the Finnish Parliament to vote against joining NATO, and leader Li Andersson was the only party head to oppose Finnish participation in NATO nuclear weapon exercises during the election debates. But the party was inescapably tarred by its association with anti-worker legislation like a draconian ban on striking by health care workers. While the party might claim it did what it did reluctantly, the fact remains that its participation in such anti-worker measures was entirely voluntary.

The Swedish People’s Party — which represents the wealthy Swedish-speaking minority in Finland — was the only coalition partner that didn’t lose any seats. It was also the sole government party to refuse to rule out entering a coalition with the Finns Party. It has only spent fifteen out of the past hundred years in opposition, and is notoriously flexible on any policy other than the promotion of the Swedish language. It is likely to play a kingmaker role in any blue-black or blue-red coalition.

All these former coalition partners will now be licking their wounds. The Left Alliance will hopefully be learning the lessons of yet another disastrous few years as the junior partner in a centrist government.

The exact composition of the next Finnish government is not yet clear. But one thing is absolutely certain. Against the backdrop of the war next door, a smug Finnish elite will further enrich itself while ramping up anti-immigrant sentiment and lowering living standards for everyone else.