Finnish News Recap, April (2nd half): MP Shootout Edition
During the last few days, the Finnish media has been dominated by one subject, so I’ll go through it in detail.
On the night between Thursday and Friday, Timo Vornanen, an MP of the ruling Finns Party, got into an altercation outside of a bar, which ended up with him taking out a gun, waving it at the people he was having squabbling with, and shooting the ground before he left. This happened around four in the morning. Vornanen had apparently been at work at the parliament until 11 PM, went home to pick up the gun and then went to the bar, and eventually got into a fight over another guy over who could sit next to 18- and 19-year-old girls (Vornanen is 54 himself). After some wrestling, the two eventually ended outside, where the notable events happened. This was witnessed, among others, by Sanna Antikainen, another Finns Party MP, who had been accompanying Vornanen. Vornanen was duly arrested and spent some time in the jail.
Apparently, Vornanen, who worked as a police officer before his election, does own and can carry the weapon legally for self-defense due to the threats he had received. It is unclear how old this license is and, initially, whether he had had the gun inside the parliament as well – many people in Finland were surprised to learn that MPs are, indeed, permitted to store firearms inside of the parliament, typically for taking it to hunt or shoot targets after a session.
However, in any case, taking a gun inside a bar is very much not a permitted activity in Finland, and shooting a weapon as a threat while drunk is even less so. As such, it was immediately apparent that the Finns Party would have to respond. They took their time, as the party’s active members and leadership were on a cruise (political parties often take their active members on cruises as a rest and recovery / group-formation activity). This wasn’t aided by the fact that the police took their time to come up with information, with many suspecting that the forces are implicitly protecting one of their own, especially one who has reached a high-level position in society like this.
Once the Finns Party got around to reacting, they swiftly and expectedly announced that they were booting Vornanen from their group. This means the government now has 108 seats out of 200 backing it – still not too close to the edge where it might fall, but with less room to play around. The government just survived a confidence vote and the Justice Minister’s habit of meddling with expert panels might also come around at some later point. Then again, at this phase, it doesn’t particularly likely that anything would happen. Whether Vornanen can keep his seat in the parliament appears to depend on what the charges would be in the eyes of the law and whether he’d be convicted – it’s not easy to lose your seat entirely due to legal troubles.
Whatever happens, things like this don’t reflect well on the party in general. There are probably many people who agree with the Finns Party on immigration or want the country generally to be more conservative but who still hold out from voting for them and continue to vote for their usual preferred center-right precisely because they feel the party is plagued by constant antics like this. At least in r/Suomi (i.e., the main Finnish-language Reddit sub for Finland), an oft-recurring opinion in election threads was, “I would vote for The Finns, but I cannot deal with this white-trash stuff, so I have to grit my teeth and vote for National Coalition once again).
One possibility might be that Vornanen now joins a right-wing micro party, giving them a seat. The openly fascist Blue-Black Movement, which recently lost its registration as a party due to lying about their program when getting registered, is almost certainly not an option, but the anti-vax and anti-EU Freedom Alliance has probably already sent feelers. Just a few days ago, Finns Party MEP Teuvo Hakkarainen – also notable for past drunken violent antics – announced he’s running on that party’s lists for the coming EU elections, also stating that he no longer feels straitjacketed by the Finns Party and can thus criticize their formal new line of being more “euro reformist” (i.e. change EU to a looser confederal model from the inside) than “Euroskeptic” (wanting to quit EU, or even euro, directly).
In other news, the press has been going gaga over new president Alexander Stubb’s wife, Suzanne Innes-Stubb (particularly during the new president’s visit to Sweden). The local Museum of Lenin is closing, and the lowering birth rates are now even afflicting the high-fertility Laestadian religious movement.