Will the Finnish Government fall due to Forums Posting?

The new Finnish government has been up for three weeks. Pretty much all of that has been spent through the various comments and stuff said and done by ministers belonging to right-wing nationalist The Finns Party, as I’ve listed in my blog recaps (see here, here and here). The last few days in Finnish politics have focused on party leader Riikka Purra, now the Finance Minister (and the second most powerful member of the govt, at least formally), and her online posts from 15 years ago.

The posts in question were made throughout 2008 in the online guestbook of previous party leader Jussi Halla-aho, the guy who basically is responsible for kickstarting the modern anti-immigration movement in Finland and for the anti-immigration hardline faction taking over The Finns Party.

Halla-aho got famous for running a blog and gaining his grassroots supporters through it, and an important part of it was his old-style webpage guestbook which eventually started functioning as an informal forum. The guestbook, alongside some other online forums, was used for bringing together his faction, which would eventually grow strong enough to elect several people as MPs. Many of these old commentators (and the people in the same general orbit) now make up the party's elite.

The entire guestbook is still online. The original guestbook at Halla-aho's website is gone (apparently due to hosting troubles), but there's a mirrored copy of it elsewhere. In February, it was noticed that one of guestbook’s posters was nicknamed “riikka”, though this didn’t quite catch on in the media back then. A collective of web sleuths went through the posts “riikka” had made recently and found a lot of dire comments. Now, Riikka is a pretty common name in Finland, so that would not alone be enough to connect this to Purra. However, the sleuths also found out that:

• "riikka" has stated that she comes from a left-wing home and that her parents had taken a pic of her as a child in front of Lenin's statue, while Riikka Purra has told a similar story on TV

• "riikka" stated that she went to same school as leftist MP Anna Kontula, and Kontula and Purra have gone to same secondary school in Tampere

• "riikka" sent her guestbook friends greetings from Barcelona on 25 August and 27 August 2008, dates on which Riikka Purra participated in an academic conference in that city

• "riikka" talked about moving to small town of Kirkkonummi in 2008 and asked about the number of immigrants in a specific neighborhood, and apparently the number was low enough, since Riikka Purra has indeed lived in that neighborhood in that town since 2008

And many other similarities . It's pretty obvious to anyone that this is the same person. Nickname "riikka" had also posted on the guestbook posts, where she:

• drops the Finnish n-word several times (it's a linguistic question whether that word is the equivalent of English n-word or the word "Negro"¹, but these are angry enough one might well say it's the former in this context), as well as talks about a Middle-Eastern man as a "Turkish monkey or whatever", as well as uses some other slurs common in the Finnish far-right community

• ironically calls herself and other forums members “rassisti” ("raycist") and “netsi ("Nezi", net + Nazi), including asking others for beer by saying "Any Nezis in Helsinki today up for spitting on beggars and beating up n-word children?"

• states that "if I had a gun there would be bodies on this train" after hearing a black teenager say "I don't care about Finland" and going "BANG BANG!" with fingerguns at her on a train (this happened two days after a notorious school shooting)

• After browsing a Finnish Islamic forum describes herself as "so full of hatred and rage she is going to melt on her chair" and says that things like this start to seriously bother her life since "there's nothing else running through [her] head"; also gets angry after seeing an overweight Somali family eating at McDonalds at the same time as her family

And other such fare. As someone familiar with Halla-aho’s guestbook and the general argot of the Finnish far right, some of the posts are edgy injokes (ie. the “Nezi” stuff), but a lot of the more flagrant racism and weird ranting has come as a genuine surprise, even to someone jaded enough as myself.

Unsurprisingly these discoveries haven’t played well in the media, local or foreign, or with the other parties in government. Finland’s foreign minister, while at the NATO summit in Vilnius, actually had to apologize to Turkey (our new NATO ally, mind) for the "Turkish monkeys" thing.

There’s some interesting stuff about her own party in the guestbook, as well. “riikka” didn’t yet belong to The Finns Party in 2008, as some people in the anti-immigration movement still pondered whether they should take over The Finns Party, back then still an inchoate rural populist force, or establish their own party, or remain in mainstream parties.

“riikka” herself had visited their election stand, but said that everyone in there was an “old overweight working-class redneck who just needed to hear that Halonen is a lesbian to shoot their load”, referring to Finland’s (non-lesbian) ex-president. One wonders if this still is how she sees some of her own party’s supporters and activists.

Purra has copped to being "riikka", and while she originally commented this by saying "there's nothing to apologize or explain", she ended up apologizing and saying that of course the government or she don't tolerate racism and so on. Many of the party's supporters are disappointed and believe that she has engaged in the dread practice of “cucking”, but of course if you're in actual government with other parties you kind of have to occasionally do what they demand you will do. The alternative might be your party getting kicked out of the government.

They still might get thrown out. After the initial scandal, someone went to see Purra’s own blog, on her website, and the newer entries, including one where Purra, in the midst of attacking burqa and other such things, referred to (burqa-wearing) Islamic women as “walking sacks”. Some statements by PM Orpo and other ministers indicated this would be seen as equally bad to Purra’s old statements. After Purra refused to apologize for this one and said it was simply about defending the rights of women, Orpo walked his criticism back.

The opposition parties have demanded Halla-aho, now the Speaker of the Parliament, to reconvene the Parliament to vote on whether Purra still has the Parliament’s trust. Halla-aho has thus far refused, on the grounds that the government got a vote of confidence just recently, but if the Swedish People’s Party, the most erstwhile member of this government, also demanded the same, he might have to do this. If the Parliament voted against Purra, the government would probably come to an ingomininous end.

All of this probably serves to indicate what happens when an Internet forum ends up taking over a political party. When you’re ranting on an online forum, you probably don’t think this will have any importance whatsoever regarding domestic policies, and can freely say what you think, or what you think might impress your racist forum buddies.

It’s not surprising that this would happen in Finland. Not only have Finns always been into online forums, there’s also a strong local strain of thought that prices political incorrectness (or, you know, just plain racism) as evidence that you’re saying what you think and speaking truthfully.

During Finland’s Cold-War-era “Finlandized” position regarding the Soviet Union the Finnish authorities *didn’t* always discuss Soviet Union and its global activities in truthful terms - and a common framing is that this should never happen again, and it’s been easy for the right to invent the framing of “multiculturalism is the new Soviet Union” to compare opposition to racism to Finlandization. However, all this might require its own blog entry to clarify further…

Potential for similar things exists might exist in other countries, considering the centrality of Internet in modern communications. Maybe there’s already a bunch of groypers or other extremely online far-righters in America making edgy jokes on Twitter or wherever, or similar groups in other countries, who will have to eventually explain that stuff 15 years from now when running for Senate or governorship. This government might be a test run for a *lot* of stuff that could become commonplace later in Western politics.

1. I wrote my [grad thesis](https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/84465/gradu06644.pdf?sequence=1) on this subject. If you click the link, it’s in Finnish (though there’s an English summary) and there’s going to be a slur right on the title page. You can probably guess which one…