Will the Finnish Government Stand or Fall?

While Finnish politics is rarely an exciting affair, the last week saw so much stale retreading of subjects that have been explained in previous recaps – racism scandal, government austerity, bird flu etc. – that it was not worth it to write a recap for week 33. Note that a lot of this is basically a repetition of what I wrote here, so maybe read that as well.

Instead, this is a good time to discuss a question that might interest many foreigners living in Finland with scarce in-depth analysis of Finnish politics available. Indeed, this question was asked by me directly by a reader. Will the Finnish government survive this autumn?

The short answer is we don’t know. The time around end of August/start of September will be crucial – or that’s what’s been said for weeks now. The parliament’s work will restart after summer break. The opposition, at the very least Left Alliance, the leftmost party of the opposition, will present a vote of confidence for minister Rydman and possibly also Riikka Purra, the Finance Minister and the chair of the right-wing populist Finns party.

It is still unclear that the Swedish People’s Party, the party in the government most uncomfortable with the Finns Party, will say and do. If the SPP gives them a thumb down, they cannot continue in the government. This would not automatically bring down the government, it will, at the very least, cause considerable problems for the government.

There’s great pressure, both internally and externally, for SPP to say no to the government… but also for them to say yes.

On the side that says SPP has no options than to pull out and collapse the government, well, there’s the fact that a recent poll shows that almost the entire voter base of SPP has a problem this government. Hardly a week goes by without a SPP politician saying that the party should no longer cooperate with the Finns Party or shouldn’t have done it in the first place. In a recent poll, a whopping 85 % of SPP voters said that they are dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with the government.

This is unsurprising. Even before the Finns Party became a one-issue party concerned above all things with reducing immigration, particularly outside Middle East and Africa), one of their chief goals was ending Finland’s bilingualism in Finnish and Swedish. The maintenance of bilingualism, on the other hand, is SPP’s chief goal.

Even beyond that, SPP does, or at least many figures inside of it do, have a certain level of genuine commitment to minority rights even beyond their own minority. If one suffers, all suffer, and so on.

In the end, no matter how many pragmatic questions there are, political parties are still supposed to have internal democracy, and there are limits to how the party leadership may if enough of the party members feel the pressure to try to overthrow the current leadership and replace them with ones that would be even willing to break the government to uphold the party’s stated principles.

On the other hand, the National Coalition, the main party in the government, seems to be mostly satisfied with a rote repetition of slogans about how this government does not tolerate racism at all, you hear, we mean it and so on. This is all too natural – the business forces behind them may not like the image problems the Finns Party brings to governance, they still desire to see that a right-wing economic policy characterized by austerity, tax cuts, deregulation and an offensive against the labor movement gets actualized.

While there are many in the opposition who would hope for National Coalition to “come to senses” and drop the Finns Party to form a government with Social Democrats, the National Coalition is currently exhibiting almost zero desire for this scenario. For many members the Finns Party is an ideal partner, as they share the party’s views on immigration, at least mostly, and the Finns Party has concurrently moved to the right on economics.

Even for those who are not as ideologically close to their erstwhile new partners, the preferred option would be not for the government to fall but for the Finns Party to become housebroken – stop making racist or otherwise caustic statements and simply concentrate on the economic agenda. Of course, the Finns Party knows that the other parties want to bring it under the heel and resists, which is one of the things that is currently making the government’s situation so precarious.

Furthermore, while the SPP might be ideologically reticent, they are also nothing if not pragmatic. Their main goal has always been to defend the Swedish-speaking minority, both its language rights and the subsidies to the Swedish-speaking areas, which also happen to be the areas where SPP politicians get elected. This goal has required always being a pliant government party, no matter the government constellation, and being able to work with whatever other parties there are.

And a simple fact that this sort of a thing – bringing a government down and immediately executing a full ideological turn – has not been done in Finland in decades, if ever. The informal rules of Finnish politics prize predictability and stability above a lot of things.

Inside the government, SPP prefers to do what the Prime Minister’s party says in the government’s internal squabbles. Nothing major separates NC and SPP ideology-wise, at least as far as SPP’s economic line goes. Swedish-speaking Finns tend to be wealthier than Finnish-speaking Finns, on average, which makes it quite natural for SPP’s political line to be pro-business and supportive of tax cuts, deregulation etc.

A recent complication for the SPP is also an announcement by the Centre Party, previously in Sanna Marin’s government and now in opposition, that if they consider the anti-racist announcement to be satisfactory, they will vote for the confidence of the ministers, thus propping up the government – and opening the door for further such support.

If the SPP departs and the government doesn’t fall, this would put them in the doghouse for an indefinite period for no obvious political gain. And such a scenario is basically SPP’s worst nightmare, the one scenario where they could imagine successive governments performing the constitutional changes required to bring down the institutions of Finnish bilingualism (or the special status of Åland, or a host of other things).

The government’s stated announcement on racism, supposed to come in the coming weeks. Few believe any announcement will mean that the Finns Party is changing its political lines or behavior, the question is how many face-saving measures it contains for other parties.

Some things suggested would be banning swastika flags or Holocaust denial, neither as such currently banned in Finland (though many cases would presumably be covered by laws against ethnic agitation and such). These might surprisingly be not be all that hard for the Finns Party, since their anti-immigrant agenda does not as such require anything related to swastikas or the Holocaust to be legal. Some people in the party might still be angry, either for free speech reasons or simply because they think that yielding in any racism-related matter is treason or cucking.

If some measure like this entered the legislative pipeline, it would then be possible to extend the life of the government simply by saying that the necessity to pass this important anti-racist law to protect human rights requires keeping the government together (and ignoring all the rest of the racism, of course).

Nevertheless, even if the government doesn’t fall now, it might fall at some point before its 4 years are up. Myself, I’d say it’s about 66% to 33% chance that the government survives at least to the end of the year and 50%-50% if it goes on until at least the start of the election season in 2027.