The National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) claims to champion liberal Western values and entrepreneurship, right? Is this true if the party succumbs to cheap anti-immigration populism?
Kokoomus MP Wille Rydman likes spewing copy-and-paste soundbites of the Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party.
Apart from his staunch Islamophobic views, he also takes up pseudo-scientific eugenicist views as in this recent news story.
Jussi Halla-aho, convicted for ethnic agitation in 2012, heads the PS. Under his leadership, the party has steered further to the far right.
Rydman is no exception when it comes to lawmakers attempting to capitalize politically of the fate of about 40 women and children at the al-Hol camp of northeast Syria.
The tweet below is an example of how far Kokoomus continues to stoop and how willing it is to forfeit the rule of law for personal gain.

“Instead of offering state aid for repatriation, if an adult Finnish citizen has turned his [or her] back on this country to serve a brutal terrorist organization, the correct thing to do is to revoke that person’s nationality and place a permanent bar from entering the country. A 17-year-old Islamist extremist is no safer from one who is 18 years old.
If these people bore a child when living in “a caliphate,” what kinds of bond does such a child have in practice with Finland? If he has never been to Finland and was brought up under an Islamist system, there is no point in repatriating the child nor is it legally possible without the whole family. [So be it] if this cannot be done legally without retrieving the rest of the family at the same time.”
One of the suggestions made by Rydman is that Finnish citizenship should be revoked with permanent bans to enter the country.
If Rydman’s opportunistic populism does not make you reach for the collective barf bag, Kokoomus Helsinki City Councillor Atte Kaleva is another one throwing Islamophobic tantrums. He tweets below that a person is guilty before he is proven innocent.

Both Rydman, Kaleva, and Kokoomus are examples of cheap populism and, most worrying, how fast they’d be ready to ditch the rule of law and our Nordic way of life for a handful of votes.
Thank you Sakari Timonen for your latest post.
