Finnish News Recap, Week 26: Nazi Drama Continues edition

NAZI JOKE RESIGNATION: As the culmination of the last week’s “Nazi joke minister” scandal, the parliament ended up confirming the controversial minister Vilhelm Junnila and giving the government a vote of confidence. Junnila did not even get the support of all the parties in the government. Most of the Swedish People’s Party, the most liberal party in the government, voted against him; he only survived since many of the opposition party MPs had already checked out of parliamentary work.

Nevertheless, two days after this vote, Junnila tendered his resignation. This was officially out of his own accord due to the controversy making his work more difficult, but it is obvious he was getting pushed out by the National Coalition, the government’s leading party. Before this, he had also managed to piss off Christian Democrats, the small socially conservative party, after it turned out that he had suggested “climate abortions” as a solution to the climate crisis.

This is not due to some genuine commitment to either climate or abortion, as Junnila has previously voted against climate laws and expanding abortion access, but rather just demonstrates the party’s longstanding commitment to trolling. Indeed, much of this stuff is, at some level, attempts at humor. Finns are quite cavalier about all this Nazi stuff due to Finland’s history, as Soviet crimes, in the end, always loom larger in Finnish consciousness than Nazi ones.

However, on another level, there is also a constant conscious trend to push the envelope window and make comments like Junnila’s more acceptable. There’s a small fascist and racist (their own terms) party called Blue-and-Black Movement that has split from The Finns Party, and their leader has repeatedly said on Twitter that they are just saying openly the things Finns Party politicians would only say in a sauna after a lot of beers.

In the end, what brought Junnila down was the fact that this affair started becoming a talk of the town in the international media, particularly in countries like Germany and Israel, where loose talk about Nazis, no matter whether in the form of a joke or not, is not going to be taken lightly. Even if the Finnish center-right still appears to be committed to their goal of utilizing populists in ramming through their economic agenda, and good economy still demands good trade relationships

NO FREE FESTIVAL TICKETS: Meanwhile, in the OTHER major The Finns Party story of the week Provinssi, one of Finland’s major music festivals, rescinded its VIP tickets to Juha Mäenpää, a rather notorious party MP. This was ostensibly for a newspaper article he had written on advice given by the Education Department to teachers in schools and kindergartens on how to handle trans issues – particularly a sentence indicating that “some boys might have a fanny”.

Mäenpää called this a sick statement, prompting Provinssi to cancel the free tickets for the reason of transphobia. It should be noted that the case was not that Mäenpää would have been entirely banned from buying a ticket, just from utilizing the free VIP ticket the festival had granted him. He was removed from the area, though, and since it was the last day of the festival, it could be argued it was impossible to buy a ticket any longer, but according to the festival, he had been notified of the ticket rescinding in advance.

Finland has a strong tradition of provincial music festivals (that is what Provinssi’s name refers to, after all), and one of the most noted ones for decades has been this one, organized in Seinäjoki, a small town in Southern Ostrobothnia. Southern Ostrobothnia is “Texas of Finland,” i.e., the most conservative part of the country, with a strong local rural cultural identity.

You can certainly get an appreciation of this ruralness from this news story (in Finnish) of Finns Party supporters, including Mr. Mäenpää himself. At least as far as friends who have lived in the region have told me, Provinssi and its organizing community are a liberal oasis amid a conservative region, so it is no accident that there would be a clash between a conservative MP and this festival.

Indeed, it’s somewhat unclear why he’d have the ticket in the first place, considering he has no end of more risible statements from before this article. The whole affair has prompted, once again, discussions on whether Finland is in risk of slipping to American-style culture wars and cancel culture, though I daresay those stable doors have been left unbolted and the horse has escaped a long time ago.

IN OTHER NEWS, yet other Finns Party ministers were profiled for conspiratiorial or otherwise hostile past comments, perhaps due to the above events, the big Pride March in Helsinki drew 100 000 people this year, and Joe Biden announces he’ll visit Finland later in July.

Image: Vilhelm Junnila. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Vilhelm-Junnila-01.jpg