Finnish News Recap, Week 17: May Day Resistance Edition

RIGHT-WING GOVERNMENT PLANNED: Prime-minister-designate Petteri Orpo finally announced the parties he wants to form a government. Surprising nobody at this point, he announced his own neoliberal National Coalition will be joined by the right-wing populist The Finns Party, the Swedish People’s Party, and the Christian Democrats.

This seems to be the government Orpo has wanted all along – a clearly right-wing coalition to conduct a policy of hard austerity, deregulation, and pro-business measures, without the Social Democrats (or Centre) to moderate these goals. There will be difficulties along the way, and nothing is guaranteed yet. Other parties have other goals, with the cosmopolitan goals of the Swedish People’s Party particularly clashing with the nationalism of The Finns Party.

Still, all four parties are in rough agreement over the general question of state finances, and National Coalition believes that this will help paper over all the disagreements on such questions as labor-based migration (now supported by Finns more than even before), which other parties support but The Finns oppose.

Naturally, left-wing parties have expressed great concern for the potential results of the government negotiations and were then duly castigated for “not keeping their powder dry” or “not giving the negotiators a working peace” or whatever.

MAY DAY FOLLIES: What caused a lot of furor, though, was a statement preceding the May Day by Paavo Arhinmäki, the left-wing deputy mayor of Helsinki, calling for resistance against the government.

Unlike in some other countries, May Day in Finland is a huge holiday. It simultaneously combines an apolitical carnival-like day for being out and about in the city and being drunk (especially if you’re a student) with the newer left-wing tradition of workers’ marches and speeches by left-wing politicians and such.

Though modern left-wing May Day rallies are just a shadow of the past, they are still an important arena for politicians to make speeches. The most notable actual speech thing was outgoing family and basic services Minister Krista Kiuru announcing she is running for Social Democratic Party chairship.

However, what led to most ire around Arhinmäki’s call for big demonstrations was that he called the government to be formed “the most right-wing since 1918”. Any reference to 1918 by leftists is, of course, going to be interpreted as a reference to the Finnish Civil War, a failed socialist revolutionary attempt in 1918, which ended around that year’s May Day.

Even though Arhinmäki was not calling for an actual revolution, the former The Finns Party leader (and still the current main ideologue) Jussi Halla-aho, for instance, compared this to Trump and the Capitol riots in 2020. Halla-aho’s reaction to the *actual* Capitol riots, as one might guess, was that it was a nothingburger.

Still, what took the actual cake was Twitter account Bamlaamo, connected to a National Coalition local party section in Helsinki, indicating that Arhinmäki’s connects would give enough reasons to ban Left Alliance. Even though party wasted no time distancing itself from this statement, this probably serves just as yet another sign of a rightward turn inside numerous sections within the National Coalition.

In other news, electricity prices continue to be wobbly, the Finnish President visited South Africa, and a hockey team (Tappara) from my city (Tampere) won the Finnish ice hockey championship, as it has done many times before.