2023-04-28 21:54:05
The social democratic coalition governments are disappearing on the map of northern Europe. After the turn to the right in Sweden, Finland is heading towards a new government with the participation of the far-right formation, the Finns Party. The announcement was made this Thursday by the leader of the National Coalition conservatives, Petteri Orpo, winner in the last parliamentary elections on April 2.
Finland, after Sanna Marin: government with the extreme right or ‘grand coalition’?
Further
After some very tight electoral results, the conservatives had on the table the possibility of forming a broad-front government with the Social Democrats of the outgoing prime minister, Sanna Marin, – the third most voted force in the elections. However, the party led by Orpo has announced that it is opting to negotiate a new government with the far-right formation that, with 20% of the votes, has managed to be the second party with the largest presence in the Finnish Parliament.
To complete the parliamentary majority, Orpo announced that the Christian Democratic Party and the Swedish People’s Party, defender of the Swedish-speaking minority in the Nordic country, have joined the negotiations on the next government coalition. Analysts in the Nordic country have advanced that the future conservative coalition would result in the most right-wing government since 1930.
Riikka Purra and the Finns Party
However, if the four-party coalition comes to fruition in the coming weeks, it would not be the first time that the Finns Party has been in the cabinet. In 2015 he was part of the Government for half a legislature together with the Conservatives and the Center Party. The break occurred in 2017, after the election as president of Jussi Halla-aho, representative of the most radical wing and political mentor of the current leader of the Finns Party, Riikka Purra.
Purra, dedicated to academic life as a doctor in International Politics at the University of Turku, did not enter politics until 2016, when she was 40 years old. Since then, she has brought a facelift and renewal to the Finns Party. However, the formation – Eurosceptic and whose highest priority is to toughen immigration and asylum policies – has not moderated her positions.
The far-right party had always been a minority in the Nordic country until in 2012, pushed by the economic crisis, euroscepticism and the discourse of fear of immigration, it managed to be the second force in Parliament in Finland. Years later, with Jussi Halla-aho at the helm, the party took on the hallmarks it has today, adopting an even more uninhibited line and upholding the cultural struggle against the left – against feminism, multiculturalism and LGTBI rights. –.
Purra became interested in the party by reading the popular blog of ultra leader Jussi Halla-aho, from which xenophobic speeches were reproduced until he was convicted of promoting hatred against Muslims. Taking as an example the alt-right American, Purra often defines herself and her formation as a honey badger, an animal that “jumps into the wasp’s nest to get the honey and doesn’t care”, as she explained in her evening speech. electoral. This metaphor has also been used repeatedly by Steve Bannon, a former political adviser to Donald Trump and a reference to the extreme right.
Outside of her political life, Purra shows herself on her social networks as a vegetarian who loves green juices and healthy food, who uploads recipes she prepares with avocado, fruit and chia seeds to Instagram. However, her political speech is based on the slogan “the interests of the Finns first”, accusing the other formations in her TikTok videos of having a populist discourse when they talk about climate change and immigration policies.
Finnish public broadcaster YLE believes that Riikka Purra and her party may be a central figure in the new government. She has repeated on several occasions that her ambition is to occupy the Ministry of Public Finance. On her bench in Parliament, she will be accompanied by 45 more ultra deputies, some of them very active on social networks, where they reproduce and naturalize the most extreme right-wing discourses that they have been able to adapt to the formats of the new times, also in the country. Nordic.
Coalition to curb public debt
The state of the economy and immigration were the main issues in the last elections and have also been the main issues for the conservatives to rule out a coalition with the Social Democrats. On paper, the four parties that must now draw the lines to draw up a new government are close on economic policies. The leader of the conservatives reiterated during the campaign and after the electoral victory that his objective is to save 6,000 million euros from the public budget in order to reduce the country’s public debt.
“We have great challenges,” said Orpo this Thursday at a press conference. “The Social Democrats have a different vision of the situation and the means needed to address it, so they will not participate in the negotiations,” he said. For her part, Marin, president of the Social Democratic Party until September, responded to the announcement of a conservative coalition by assuring that she is “particularly concerned about the subsistence of the weakest people in society, as well as how the reforms will be in the labor market and, therefore, Of course, how will the cuts in health and social assistance services affect them?
Although the foundations for forming a new government in Finland are becoming more established with each passing day, the leaders of the three conservative formations predict slow and not easy negotiations with the far-right formation. “We will take the necessary time for the new government to work in the month of June, with a good program,” said the conservative leader.
The biggest points of disagreement between the four formations will probably be found around the objective of the Finns Party to toughen immigration policies. Inspired by the harsh immigration laws of Denmark, the ultra formation wants to make family reunification processes difficult for asylum seekers and end immigration from outside the countries of the European Union. Faced with these proposals, the conservatives of the National Coalition defend the need to accept foreign labor to make up for the serious deficit of workers that affects a good part of the industrial sector in the country.
The decision of the Swedish People’s Party to sit at the same negotiating table also raises doubts, since the far-right party proposes to abolish the teaching of the Swedish language in Finnish schools and that Swedish is no longer the second official language in the country .
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