Finnish News Recap, March (2nd half): The Usual
I wrote an article on The Finns Party. I’ve discussed these themes multiple times, but I wanted to focus a bit here on what I feel some important themes that aren’t all that frequently in discussions about this party; the fundamental role of online forums argumentation culture on its development, the ideology as “liberalism gone sour” rather than traditional conservatism of any sort, and the rising role of the youngest generation of the party.
Following the leaderships of Soini, Halla-aho and now Purra, the Finns party’s leadership will likely fall next to the younger generations. Unlike Soini, creating a new party out of the ashes of an existing one, and Halla-aho and Purra, who essentially arrived in Soini’s party as interlopers, this younger layer has spent their entire adult lives in a situation where the Finns Party is a known, increasingly accepted, entity on the political stage, and where Halla-aho’s dark writings represent a bygone era.
Yet while their chosen media is Youtube and TikTok, addressing vast new audiences in the so-called “Zoomer generation”, their tone is much the same – combative, hectoring, sarcastic. The message is the same, too, with opposition to immigration and support for right-wing economics at its heart. Anti-immigrant views that were once radical heresies of liberalism are now something that a generation has been exposed to – online and off – their entire lives. It is no longer the politics of a radical fringe, to be advanced through populist political crusades, but rather the subject of “normal” politics, a march through the institutions, and the strengthening of an ongoing paradigm shift.
Perhaps one prudent reminder of this is three Finns Party MPs – Tynkkynen, Bergbom and Vigelius, the latter two under thirty and the first one a bit older but still very important for the party’s youth success as a product of the multimedia age – starting a podcast that quickly became the most popular Finnish podcast in Spotify, probably aided by angry reaction by social media lefties who can’t help but boosting it by vaguely tweeting how bad it is that these right-wing figures are, indeed, saying right-wing stuff in their podcast.
Anyhow, there haven’t been particularly striking *new* developments regarding long running issues. There has been a school shooting today with at least one dead, but since we don’t know more beyond that the shooter was a 12-year-old, it’s hard to comment this beyond noting it as a tragedy.
To recoup the usual stuff:
· Finland’s low fertility rates (1,28 last year – there are signs this year there might be some modest improvement) have been a national on/off topic for quite some time now. Finland’s newspaper of note, Helsingin Sanomat, dramatized this quite effectively last week with a story on how, in 2100, the amount of Finns (defined here as someone who has been born in Finland with at least one parent also born in Finland), might drop to as low as one million. By itself, the number is not the most important thing, as there has been a period in history when the population of Finland has been one million previously, too (somewhere around 1816-1817) – but rather the age structure, which wouldn’t be the same as in 1810s but rather heavily lopsided towards the pensioners, unless the fertility crisis is turned around or there’s considerably more labor-based immigration, which would then lead to its own issues.
· Debate on whether pensions should be cut as a part of the government’s austerity process continues, as the government’s first social security cuts entered in force on April 1. These mainly cut housing benefits, leading to some fears of housing market – already extremely wobbly, with exceptionally new number of new housing projects on the agenda – being affected. The non-means-tested portion of the unemployment benefit, meant to allow small-scale part-time work while unemployment, is also being removed, presumably in hopes of getting people to take full-time rather than part-time jobs. It is hard to see how these might improve, for instance, the fertility issue.
· The union strikes and the debate on cuts will probably continue for a good part of the year, if not the whole year. After the hopes for a settlement came to naught, the unions have extended their industrial strikes by a week. While there had been a promise that the strikes would this time not affect the lives of the ordinary people too heavily, the fuel prices have been edging up – of course embarrassing for government parties who had run heavily on bringing the high fuel prices down in 2023, but also potentially lowering support for strikers among the rest of the population.
· The government continues to advance its Border Protection Act, designed to allow the so-called pushbacks – i.e. sending back asylum applicants at the border without taking them up for any processing in cases where it’s believed that a foreign power is attempting to utilize a flow of immigrants maliciously. It continues to be unclear how legal or constitutional this would be, though with a 5/6 majority (i.e. what is needed to change the constitution in a rapid process) anything could become constitutional. International treaties are a whole another issue, too. At least the President has endorsed it, though in the Finnish system, this doesn’t really affect the legislative process in any concrete way.
Image: Finns Party (the older generation) campaigning. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Finns_Party#/media/File:Perussuomalaiset_Hakaniemen_torilla.jpg