“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.
Siksi en aio enää äänestää maahanmuuttajataustaisia poliitikkoja, koska olen pettynyt heidän toimintaansa. Moni meistä maahanmuuttaja- taustaisista äänestäjistä, odotti heidän edustavan meitä ja puhuvan rasismia ja syrjintää vastaan. Sen sijaan monet heistä näyttävät sopeutuvan valtavirtapolitiikkaan, keskittyen vain oman uransa edistämiseen.
Heidän kantansa ovat usein joko mitäänsanomattomia tai jopa edistävät suomalaiseen politiikkaan juurtunutta rasismia. Äänestimme heitä, koska uskoimme heidän olevan niitä, jotka taistelevat meitä kohtaavaa syrjintää vastaan. Mutta todellisuudessa he eivät vain jätä puuttumatta ongelmiin, vaan joskus jopa vahvistavat vastakkainasettelua ja pitävät yllä stigmaa, jonka kanssa maahanmuuttajat Suomessa kamppailevat.
Tämä on ollut suuri pettymys.
*Mahad Sheikh Musse on työskennellyt yli 20 vuotta nuorten ohjaajana Helsingissä. Hän on myös Migrant Talesin säännöllinen kolumnisti-kirjoittaja.
In light of the rise of the far right and the anti-migration megaphone getting louder in Finland and Europe, are we at a crossroads? Does it boil down to two factors: inclusion or exclusion?
One of the matters missing today in our ever-growing culturally diverse society is credible pathways to inclusion and citizenship. This may be easier said than done considering how narratives are stacked against migrants and minorities by politicians, the media, and the public.
But how can we speak and advance inclusion and citizenship if our politicians, and institutions are more interested in stressing us versus them?
Historically, Finland has done everything possible to put the breaks on migration. In the 1970s, when Finns were emigrating in droves to Sweden, the government at the time could plug the labor shortage with migrants.
You guessed right: it turned down such an opportunity and today we are paying a high price for such short-sightedness.
And let’s not forget the hostile environment, which like in the UK in 2012, passed laws to make staying in the country as difficult as possible.
Few if any brave voices are coming out from the jungle to challenge institutional racism and exclusion.
Let’s look at Finland’s migration policy, which Interior Minister Mari Rantanen has called a paradigm shift. Such policies are driven by mistrust and suspicion of our ever-growing culturally diverse communities. If we continue on this ruinous path, we will fail at building a well-functioning society.
Here is the sobering news: To alleviate our demographic woes and the negative environment against migrants and minorities, we will have to rewrite our new identity based on inclusion and citizenship.
Who we are and how we ientify depends on us and must be respected. The aim is not to become a carbon copy of Matti or Maija Meikeläinen but to celebrate our identity on our own terms.
If Finland fought heroically in the Winter War (1939-40) against all odds, it can overcome the next challenge that is based on its future survival and wellbeing
Center Party Chairperson Antti Kaikkonen gave a long interview on Saturday’s Ykkösaamu. Apart from all his views about the government’s program to bring growth during extreme austerity, Kaikkonen is asked about labor migration at the end of the interview.
He said Finland needs labor migrants. He said, “We don’t need criminals, we don’t want bums.”
This is an odd statement coming from a politician who got in 2013 a suspended prison sentence in a financing scandal.
Finland’s memory is short and selective.
YLE’s Ykkösaamu: “We don’t need criminals, we don’t want bums,” said Antti Kaikkonen.
Tweets @reija_harkonen: “[Center Party Chairperson Antti] Kaikkonen has been sentenced to prison for abuse of a position of trust. Now he is using the trust of the Center Party’s members by publicly moving the party into the mainstream racist fold.
About 20% – if not more – of Finnish voters are racist di**heads.
Few, if any, were alarmed by the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* victory in the 2011 election, which raised the number of MPs to 39 from five previously. Too many believed, incorrectly, that the PS would implode like what happened with the Rural Party in 1972 after winning two years earlier 17 seats from one previously.
The PS did not implode but became the most successful party in general elections and continued its assault and chipping away at Finnish democracy. The PS and others like the National Coalition Party (NCP) disagree with the country’s liberal opening up after it became an EU member in 1995.
Many reforms were made at the end of the 1990s like the new Constitution, citizenship law, and others that encouraged inclusion and non-discrimination.
Apart from making Finland a more inclusive country that guarantees Human Rights and social equality, the present government is taking us in the opposite direction. Apart from trade union and the most vulnerable members of our society, the government is tearing away at the rights of migrants and asylum seekers.
The iliberal reforms even encouraged parliament in July to pass a law that shelves Human Rights, our constitutional rights, and international obligations by denying people asylum at the Finnish-Russian border.
The sentencing of a respected scholar on racism of aggravated defamation by a Turku Court is more of a warning to others who may protest against ethnic profiling by security guards and the police. The verdict raises a lot of answered questions.
One of these is why was the seventeen-year-old put in handcuffs for not having a valid ticket. If he were white, would he have received the same treatment by the ticket inspectors and security guards?
The Helsinki Police, and the Finnish police in general, have a dismal reputation for dealing with ethnic profiling. It wasn’t too long ago when the police admitted that they did not ethnically profile anyone.
Why did the media think it is important to constantly identify the victim as “a dark-skinned” person?
Finland, a bright yesterday, so vivid one feels he can still touch it: a society striving for better living standards, equitable opportunities, and ideals of fundamental human rights, a happy nation where almost all its inhabitants did not feel a sharp gap between the rich and the poor, a country that did not leave the poor (low-income or vulnerable people) to fend for themselves… or behind.
While promising a better tomorrow, the future echoes a growing economic divide, which will come with social tension, mental anguish, and an era of unrest, to be the next generation’s inheritance. An inheritance of an incohesive society, deteriorating public welfare systems, decline of social safety nets particularly for low-income people, seniors, and retirees, racism and fears instead of inheriting a world of endless possibilities. The promised magic wand turned out to be a grim scissors.
The drivers, while ignoring perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of this regressive trajectory, insist on (shifting from a society that celebrates openness and liberal values to one that is increasingly closed-off and xenophobic, eroding the fundamental human rights and disregarding the basic principles of human dignity), and is on its way to ‘no-‘ where they succeeded to tarnish to some extent the Finnish reputation on the global stage, the legacy of tolerance and progress that was built over years and years. It is being overshadowed by the very few, our happy four members in government have managed to do.
For there was nothing more fruitful for the political “leaders” but to blame it all on the “strangers” to their ideals, ideals that fit in few words, “whites, but not any, and with blue eyes but not from elsewhere.” No landmark was more celebrated on their way than how swift and effective it is, to approve and pass a law that pushes back those who are not welcome or desired. As the ‘car’ is effectively unreliable there were more than just frequent stops to fuel more hate and share some racism to “touch base” and distract the curious followers questioning the destination.
Ai generated image by the author. “We just invented a new way to drive…Just like we do in government, we don’t need a steering wheel, driving direction, or even direction. If y scissors can find a solution, it should not be seen as a real problem.”
If immigrants and their contribution to society, the economy, and professional labor are the issues, one should think if the ones that are accepted or needed would not accept a better offer, with lighter workloads and better pay elsewhere, from very close nations that for them people are valued, nations that have become favored for among others like Finnish professionals to move and work in.
Two-headed car from the famous Uuno Turhapuro movie, ”Uuno Espanjassa”
From ‘Kaksipäinen auto’ from Uuno Espanjassa that brought laughter and joy to ‘kaksipäinen hallitusohjelma‘ of our ‘Leaders’ which does not in any way bring more than gloom. The peculiar car in many ways portray the contradictions, open but very closed, liberal but very conservative, “Zero tolerance” but very racist and government program to combat racism but the program they came up with!
The government’s celebration of their way out of many racist scandals ‘Me Puhumme Teoin’ (Action, not only words) campaign reminded me of a saying I heard:
“Not every bump in a belly is a ‘blessed’ baby, more often than not, it’s just gas.“
Suomen Muslimifoorumi ry. kiittää mahdollisuudesta lausua luonnoksesta valtioneuvoston toimenpideohjelmaksi rasismin torjumisesta ja yhdenvertaisuuden edistämisestä. Kiitämme myös pääministeri Orpon hallitusta siitä, että se tiedostaa syrjinnän ja rasismin olemassaolon Suomessa ja on päättänyt tehdä toimenpideohjelman asiaan puuttumiseksi.
Suomen Muslimifoorumi ry. pitää kuitenkin huolestuttavana sitä, että toimenpideohjelmassa eikä sitä edeltäneessä tiedonannossa mainita kertaakaan islamofobiaa yhtenä rasismin muotona. Tämä ilmentää nähdäksemme sitä, että hallitus ei tunnista islamofobiaa yhteiskunnalliseksi ongelmaksi ja/tai ei halua myöntää sen olemassaoloa. Toimenpideohjelmassa mainitaan muslimit vain kerran, ja sekin muiden syrjintää kokevien ryhmien yhteydessä. Myös kansanedustaja Inka Hopsu on kirjallisessa kysymyksessään KK 210/2024 vp nostanut asian esille ja tiedustellut, “miksi hallituksen rasismin torjumisen ja yhdenvertaisuuden edistämisen toimenpideohjelma ei tunnista riittävästi muslimeihin kohdistuvaa vihamielisyyttä Suomessa ja mitä hallitus aikoo tehdä islamofobian torjumiseksi?”.
Islamofobia ei ole vain rasistista huutelua kadulla, vaan myös osa Suomessa esiintyvää rakenteellista syrjintää ja niin kutsuttua “salonkikelpoista” rasismia. Tästä kertoo muun muassa vuosittain julkaistava European Islamophobia Report. Suomen Muslimifoorumi ry. haluaakin muistuttaa pääministeri Orpon hallitusta siitä, että rasisminvastaisen tiedonantoon johtaneissa muutaman vuoden takaisissa, nykyisen valtiovarainministerin esittämissä rasistisissa kommenteissa oli muun muassa kyse musliminaisten kutsumisesta “mustiksi säkeiksi”. Suomessa esiintyvä islamofobia on siis, kuten muissakin Euroopan maissa, yhteiskunnallinen ongelma. Se ei kuitenkaan koske vain muslimeita vaan myös henkilöitä, jotka rodullistetaan muslimeiksi ja jotka joutuvat siten islamofobisten hyökkäysten kohteiksi. Islamofobia, kuten muutkin rasismin muodot, ovat vaaraksi demokratialle sekä heikentävät yhteiskuntamme yhteenkuuluvuutta ja sosiaalista yhdenvertaisuutta.
Toimenpideohjelmassa uskontoon perustuva syrjintä ja rasismi on typistetty antisemitismiksi, ja ainoat uskontospesifit, konkreettiset toimenpiteet liittyvät tähän. Vähättelemättä lainkaan antisemitismin uhkaa ja kasvua, tulisi myös suomalaisten muslimien kokemaan syrjintään, rasismiin, vihapuheeseen ja turvallisuusuhkiin puuttua konkreettisesti. Muun muassa sisäministeriön vuonna 2021 tekemän selvityksen mukaan 69% vastanneista muslimeista kokee turvattomuutta uskonnollisten tilojen läheisyydessä. Lisäksi tuorein Suomen poliisiammattikorkeakoulun tekemä viharikosselvitys toteaa, että suurimmassa osassa uskontoon liityvissä viharikoksissa kohteena olivat muslimit.
