Does anyone remember councilman Risto Helin of the western Finnish city of Vaasa, who resigned from the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party in August 2013 after he became a suspect in an aggravated pimping case? Remember when the councilman who, among other things likes to wear white power blood & honor t-shirts, gave a Hitler clock to a neo-Nazi group in Vaasa? Yep. That’s him: Risto Helin. His trial will begin on February 17. who is now on trial for pimping, according to MTV3.
Helin, who says he’ll continue to work as a councilman despite that he’s on trial, didn’t want to comment about the case.
One matter that surprises a lot of people about Helin is how a person with neo-Nazi sympathies and who is now on trial for aggravated pimping ever got elected to city council in the first place.
The answer is in the April 2011 parliamentary elections: How did a populist anti-EU, anti-immigration, homophobic and especially anti-Islam party like the PS win 39 seats from 5 in 2007?
For one it shows that there are a lot of people in this country who don’t feel uncomfortable with fascism and neo-Nazis.
Read full story (in Finnish) here.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The names adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.
One matter that surprises a lot of people about Helin is how a person with neo-Nazi sympathies and who is now on trial for aggravated pimping ever got elected to city council in the first place.
Are you really surprised because of this or are you just using this to once again insult and victimize PS? Because if you were really wondering that, you would have done much better than just coming up with “people voted for Nazis!”
Why he got elected? Maybe because he did not campaign as a Nazi pimp? Maybe because in representative democracy, you just listen what the candidates tell you and hope you get what has been promised to you. Digging out the closets of the every city councilor candidate is not really possible.