[Finance Minister Riikka] Purra’s conclusion was that the party would start focusing on communication and highlighting issues that were important to it more decisively than before.
Concerning the nosedive in opinion polls for the Perussuomalaiset (PS) and with three election setbacks behind them, it’s clear that the party is in crisis and will do everything possible to lure voters. Finland will hold its general election in April 2027.
One of these stunts was announced yesterday when Finance Minister Purra said that one billion euros would be cut from next year’s budget. For starters, the cuts would come from reducing development aid, ending the quota refugee system, and abolishing the National Board of Education.
Government partners like the National Coalition Party and the Swedish People’s Party have pushed back on Purra’s spending cuts.
Se oli nopea hetki – kuva nuorten tapahtumasta, jonka piti välittää iloa, kohtaamista ja yhteisöllisyyttä. Mutta tarkemmin katsottuna jokin särähti.
Kuvassa näkyi nuorisotyöntekijä, jonka käden ele muistutti symbolia, jota on viime vuosina käytetty rasistisena viestinä – erityisesti äärioikeiston piirissä. Vaikka ele itsessään voi monelle näyttää viattomalta, konteksti, historia ja eleen ajoitus tekevät siitä merkityksellisen. Tämä ei tuntunut sattumalta.
Ammattilaisena nuorten parissa tiedän, että joka ikinen sana, ilme ja ele kantaa viestiä.
Ne voivat rakentaa tai rikkoa. Ne voivat antaa tunteen osallisuudesta tai ulkopuolisuudesta. Nuori, joka tunnistaa eleen merkityksen, ei voi olla miettimättä: Oliko tämä suunnattu minua kohtaan? Olenko minä täällä ei-toivottu?
Maahanmuuttajataustaisena nuorena tällaiset tilanteet jäävät ihon alle. Ne eivät ole vain yksittäisiä hetkiä – ne kietoutuvat osaksi laajempaa kokemusta, jossa joutuu jatkuvasti arvioimaan, onko ympäristö oikeasti turvallinen. Missä tahansa muualla ele olisi ehkä ohitettu, mutta kun se tapahtuu tilassa, jonka pitäisi olla turvallinen ja arvostava, se sattuu enemmän.
Rasismi ei aina huuda – se kuiskaa eleissä, nauruissa, sivulauseissa. Se voi piiloutua “vitseihin”, joita ei koskaan tarkoitettu vakavasti, mutta jotka silti osuvat. Ja se kasvaa, kun niitä ei tunnisteta eikä puututa.
Siksi antirasistinen työote ei ole valinnainen lisä nuorisotyössä – se on perusta, jolle kaikki rakentuu. Se tarkoittaa, että opimme tunnistamaan myös symbolien ja kielen piilomerkityksiä. Se tarkoittaa, että kuuntelemme, kun joku sanoo tulleensa satutetuksi – emme puolustaudu vaan pysähdymme. Se tarkoittaa, että otamme vastuun.
Nuoret tarvitsevat ympäristön, jossa he voivat tuntea kuuluvansa – ilman pelkoa, ilman jatkuvaa varuillaan oloa. Ja me aikuiset – etenkin me, jotka teemme töitä nuorten kanssa – olemme vastuussa siitä, millaisen viestin annamme. Meidän tehtävämme ei ole vain tukea nuoria, vaan myös katsoa itseämme peilistä.
Antirasismi ei ole yksittäinen teko, vaan jatkuvaa valintaa puhua, toimia ja kasvaa.
*Mahad Sheikh Musse monikulttuurisen nuorisotyön ammattilainen, joka omaa vuosien kokemus viranomaisten ja eri yhteisöjen kanssa työskentelmisestä. Hän on myös Migrant Talesin säännöllinen kolumnisti-kirjoittaja ja toimituksen jäsen.
The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* are a deadly chameleon. It can look “normal” until it lashes out like a venomous snake.
The PS’ neo-conservative cloak is only a deception appealing to right-wingers who justify the paradigm shifts and inhumane cuts in public spending. Finance Minister Riikka Purra is a two-headed monster: with one head she looks sort of mainstream while with the other she lashes out, overtaken by her far-right ideology.
In Finland, the PS is the most Trump- and Maga-friendly party.
We got another glimpse of Purra’s two headed monster with the tweet below thanking US Vice President JD Vance for his words, which shocked the audience at the Munich Security Conference with his brutal ideological attack on Europe. He accused Europe of suppressing free speech, fearing voters and failing to stop “illegal” migration.”
All these topics were irresistable awakening the monster in Purra.
Purra tweets: “What a great speech from JD Vance. Freedom, freedom of speech, democracy; threats from within, inability to fight illegal immigration.
✨Excellent values are words that are easily repeated in Europe, but all too often far too difficult to implement.”
Authoritarian regimes make fatal mistakes that have been proven time and again. One of these is when they believe in their invencibility. When this happens, it is a clear path to their demise.
Finance Minister Riikka Purra is good at looking “mainstream” but only until President Trump or his vice president JD Vance plays the PS’s favorite far-right or Maga tune. Cartoon: Ted Bauer.
I wrote a while back how sparks that created social movements changed history. Such events are unpredictable and can happen at any time.
Below is one example of many that helped ignite the civil rights movement.
As Malcolm X once said: “There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”
Watching a Yle news broadcast on the arrival of Filipino practical nurses at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, I could not hold back my concern for these migrants and how they could fall prey to greedy employers. It has happened too many times before.
The government of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, which continues to implement its racist and hardline migration policy, reiterated that it wants labor migrants from four countries: the Philippines, India, Vietnam, and Brazil. In the face of the government’s extreme tightening of migration policy, the government – especially the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* – would be willing to give migrants from these countries a chance to move to Finland and plug our chronic labor shortage.
Reading the minds and past policies of the PS and the National Coalition Party (NCP), it’s clear that some of these future practical nurses have fallen into a trap. Apart from living in a difficult climate and culture compared with their home country, they will be effectively at the mercy of their employers.
How long will it take before some of their stories of exploitation will come to light? This is a valid question because we not only have many cases backing up such a situation but also Finland’s unpreparedness to defend the rights of foreign workers.
Apart from this sad reality, Finland’s government and its migration policy are the clearest examples that parties like the PS will admit to a flaw in their demographic calculations but are ready to accept migrants who will not challenge their white Finnish privilege and promise to be subservient to the system.
Prioritizing migrants from four countries is a flawed plan that will only create more division among the migrant communities since the government has gone as far as to further categorize people as “good” and “undesireable” migrants.
“I do not consider [Prime Minister] Petteri Orpo to be a racist. But the fact is that as Prime Minister he enables, legitimizes, and in a way I think incites that thinking in this coalition in Finland. Is that civilized? In my opinion, it is not.“
Kirsi Piha, a former National Coalition Party (NCP) MP and candidate for Helsinki mayor, announced her resignation from the NCP due to its bond with the radical-right Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party. “I think [the government] policies are inward-looking,” she said. “They are based on prejudice and hatred, it is based on zero-sum game thinking, and therefore pure racism.”
PS Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Ville Tavio, who has expressed an affinity for French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and Poland and Hungary, was the latest scandal to chip another chip off Finland’s international image.
Tavio unilaterally decided Finland would not join an international gender-equality alliance to rebuild Ukraine. Such an alliance promotes sexual and gender minorities, which are red flags for Tavio’s homophobic political worldview.
Tavio’s decision, which would put Finland in the same league as Poland and Hungary on sexual minority issues, according to University of Helsinki researcher Johanna Vuorelma, got a swift reaction from President Alexander Stubb.
“I hope that in the future we will not see similar mistakes from the ministry for foreign affairs, that the president will not be informed of matters that belong to the minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, but are related to our foreign and security policy,” said Stubb.
Obsessed by conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, Tavio never responded to a rebuttal I wrote in Helsinki Times.
Considering how racism has shed its roots in Finland thanks to Orpo’s government, PS MP Jenni Simula ridicules Social Democratic chairperson Antti Lindtman by shouting, “can we get that in Arabic too,” after he says a few words in Swedish, Finland’s official language.
Simula is a member of the far-right Suomen Sisu association and the former secretary of ex-MP Olli Immonen, a former chairperson of Suomen Sisu.
Another example of how Finland has lost its moral compass was the naming of Henna Virkkunen as EU executive vice-president for tech-sovereignty, security and democracy.
Virkkunen, who is an NCP MEP, would not care less for the fate of those crossing and drowning in the Mediterranean.
In the 2019 MEP election, she responded in the Alma Meter election compass in the affirmative to question 13 (1): “The EU must save all those migrants who are at risk of drowning attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.”
Virkkunen “disagreed” that the EU must save those migrants crossing the Mediterranean from drowning.
Virkkunen is in “good” company. The five MEPs would not care if people died after being pushed back at the border. Three are the ruling National Coalition Party, the Perussuomalaiset*, and the opposition Center Party.
The paper, written by Enrique Tessieri in 2009 for the Social Science Department of Turku University, explains how sociological intervention helped promote and strengthen cultural sensitivity at a folk high school 14 kilometers from the Eastern Finnish city of Mikkeli. From 2010-2011, Otava Folk High School became the first school in Eastern Finland – if not nationally- to offer halal meat regularly to its Muslim students.
One of the positive changes that sociological intervention brought was bringing down the fences between us and them by creating a more inclusive climate. “Otava Folk High School was one of the first in 2010 to serve regularly halal meat in Finland 2-3 times a week to students, which are mostly Muslims. In order to promote inclusiveness, students are no longer called migrant students but multicultural students. Otava Folk High School offers different types of education but the most important for multicultural students include upper secondary school, comprehensive school, predatory comprehensive school, and Finnish language and culture courses for asylum seekers.” (See “The Shifting Global World of Youth and Education,” edited by Mabel Ann Brown, Routledge, 2018, page 105).
While these changes were promoted with the help of sociological intervention and cultural sensitivity, they were short-lived in 2018 by Principal Harri Jokinen, who cited economic factors.
If you are going to promote cultural diversity and sensitivity at a school, it depends a lot on the management, in the case of Otava Folk High School,, on the principal.
The problem with this law is that it calls into question the whole idea of the rule of law. It allows the Finnish government to declare that there is a threat at the border of a “hybrid invasion”. This declaration can be made based on secret security information the government may claim to have and no court can examine and rule on the validity of the information. The declaration of a hybrid invasion will allow the border authorities to turn away anyone and everyone no matter what danger they are facing. This can include both foreigners and Finnish citizens as the authorities have emergency powers to forgo examination of documents and identities. In fact as Minister Mari Rantanen has stated, the persons crossing the border may not even know themselves that they are involved in a hybrid invasion. So there is no real way of knowing who the government is “pushing back” at the border or why or what will happen to them outside Finland. In fact, if there are people the government does not like, the government now has the powers to expel, beat up or even shoot dead persons they do not like without legal accountability. All they have to do is wait until these unlikeable people are at a border point and then enact this new so-called law which can be done in very short order.
“Pushbacks” carried out under this law are not appealable or open to judicial review. Backers of the law argue that it will only be applied in rare and unusual situations.
They said the same about the Valtalaki when it was adopted. It was enacted for the first time during the Corona epidemic to close off Uusimaa from the rest of the country. The problem is that when such laws for rare powers are adopted, the government soon finds ways to use them to extend their power, The Valtalaki was challenged in Parliament and eventually ended by a vote by MPs. The “Pushback Law” is special in that it has no provision for parliamentary review. The EU human rights court may yet weigh in on the law but there are forces at work to also erode the rule of law in the EU with a similar law EU wide. And you thought the rule of law was sometning Finland champions in the world?
*Ahti Tolavanen is a regular Migrant Tales contributor and a member of the editorial board.
The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* and Interior Minister Mari Rantanen got bitten hard by her own and some of the party’s racist statements on A-studioby host Marja Sannikka.
Rantanen’s ignorance and loathing of migrants, especially Muslims and people of color, shines through as usual. The PS is the first modern party in Finland to capitalize on xenophobia.
The A-studio interview reinforced a lot of matters about Rantanen’s and the PS’s xenophobia. Rantanen claimed that the PS had the right to change migration policy “democratically” even if such changes exclude and discriminate against migrants.
Rantanen like her party, incorrectly believes, that they have a carte blanch to say and do almost what they want with migrants, who don’t have the right to vote them out of power.
Social Democrat MP Nasima Razmyar (left) and Interior Minister Mari Rantanen. Source: A-studio
Kansainvälistyminen on mahdollisuus. Näin kuvasi myös Mikkelin kaupunginjohtaja Janne Kinnunen Länsi-Savon haastattelussa 9.6. Etelä-Savon ja Mikkelin väestökehityksen näkökulmasta se on jopa välttämättömyys.
Väestön väistämättä ikääntyessä ja vähetessä kohtaamme merkittäviä haasteita erityisesti työvoiman saatavuudessa. Tarvitsemme uusia asukkaita, sekä edellytyksiä yrityksille ottaa vastaan työvoimaa myös Suomen rajojen ulkopuolelta.
Suomalainen yhteiskunta on aina ollut monimuotoinen, ja ihmiset edustavat erilaisia kulttuurisia, uskonnollisia ja kansallisia taustoja. Väestötietojen perusteella kuitenkin Mikkeli ja Etelä-Savo jäävät moninaisuudessa jälkeen muista Suomen kaupungeista ja maakunnista.
Tilastokeskuksen mukaan, vuonna 2023 Mikkelissä muuta kieltä kuin suomea ja ruotsia puhuvien osuus väestöstä oli 5,4 prosenttia. Vertailun vuoksi Helsingissä vastaava luku oli 19,5, Tampereella 10,4, Lappeenrannassa 9,9 ja Jyväskylässä 6,8 prosenttia. Vaikka Mikkelin vieraskielinen väestö on kasvanut 20 vuodessa, ja on nyt 2 810 asukasta, on kasvu ollut vaatimatonta.
On hyvä tunnistaa, että moninaisuus on hyvän työyhteisön ja elinympäristön ominaisuus. Työelämän monimuotoisuuden, tasa-arvon ja yhdenvertaisuuden edistämisellä on suuri merkitys Suomeen muuttaneiden työllistymiselle ja onnistuneelle kotoutumiselle.
Yhdenvertaisessa yhteiskunnassa eri väestöryhmät ovat edustettuina ja osallisina eri organisaatioissa ja työtehtävissä. Moninaisuusosaamistaan voi lisätä koulutuksen avulla ja sitä ansiokkaasti tarjoavat monet tahot, kuten THL, opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriö, European Network Against Racism ja CEJI. Koulutus auttaa tunnistamaan syrjinnän muotoja ja antaa keinoja niiden purkamiseen.
Poliittinen tahtotila yhdenvertaisuuteen ja syrjimättömyyteen Suomessa on olemassa, esimerkiksi perustuslain ja yhdenvertaisuuslain muodossa, mutta laki yksistään ei riitä, ellei se toteudu arjessa ja kunnissa eri puolella Suomea. Siksi moninaisuuden ja sosiaalisesti kestävän kehityksen vahvistaminen on aloitettava nyt.
Kaupunki voi toimia esimerkkinä moninaisuusosaamisen edistämisessä kouluttamalla oman henkilöstönsä ja päättäjät vahvistamaan monimuotoisuutta edistäviä rakenteita, jotta Mikkeli on entistä parempi paikka kansainvälisten osaajien työllistyä ja juurtua.
Jatta Juhola ja Enrique Tessieri
Juhola on kaupunginvaltuutettu ja kaupunginhallituksen jäsen (sd.), Tessieri on varavaltuutettu (sd.).
Just like a junkie craving for a shot, the campaign by the far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS)* showed revealed their immigration dependency problem. Like a gas pedal, the PS has stepped on the immigration topic to attract voters.
Immigration is a highly politicized topic in Finland as well and directly related to the success of the PS over the last decade. During all the last four parliamentary elections, the PS has successfully used an immigration crime topic to attract voters.
The European parliamentary election was a fiasco for the PS. Source: Yle
As a non-white Finn, the campaign by the likes of PS Chairperson and Minister of Finance Riiikka Purra, Interioir Minister Mari Rantanen, and Simo “Rwanda Model Now” Grönroos, was enough to make your stomach turn.
