While the biggest victor of today’s presidential election in Finland is democracy, I cannot help but look way past the awaiting fanfare of Sunday evening , when we’ll be hearing the victory speech of either Pekka Haavisto of the Green Party or Kokoomus’ Sauli Niinistö.
In many respects, Finnish voters decided in the first round of the election that they do not want a cliffhanger repeat of what we saw in April nor a president that is anti-EU, anti-immigration and colorblind with respect to our country’s ever-growing cultural diversity.
During the past ten-odd months, Finns have not only come to know racism, homophobia and anti-democratic credentials of some of the PS MPs, but the lame excuses justifying such shameful examples.
Few will deny that Finland faces many big challenges in the next six years. In many respects, our values will determine how we address those challenges. What kind of leadership will Haavisto and Niinistö offer Finns and immigrants living in the country on how to tackle ever-rising poverty, social inequality, streamlining costs that will weaken our social welfare state, and our general view of the outside world?
Should we invest more on programs that fuel social equality or on fear of ourselves and the outside world through institutions like the police and defense forces?
When I go to vote today, I will be weighing these issues.
Comment: Compared with Finland, Ireland appears like a distant world when it comes to anti-immigration groups and their hate rhetoric.
Both countries have seen a lot of emigration since the nineteenth century. In Finland over a million people emigrated to other parts of the world during 1860-1999. A study in 1978 showed that since 1820 over 4.723 million people emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland alone.
Apart from such similarities, there is one big difference: Ireland lacks an anti-immigration party whereas Finland has the Perussuomalaiset (PS), which became the third-biggest party in the April election.
There may be many reasons why Ireland doesn’t have an anti-immigration party. One of these could be tolerance. In Ireland such anti-social behavior isn’t seen favorably by politicians and the public while in Finland it is.
How many politicians would be forced to resign in Finland if they followed Ireland’s example? The Irish Examiner writes: “Last November, Mr [Darren] Scully was forced to resign as mayor of Naas, after saying he would no longer deal with, as he described them, bad-mannered, aggressive, black Africans. The party has not taken any decisive action.”
If we cited the comments made by many Finns concerning the death of a Somali in Oulu this week, we could conclude that too many think that racism is acceptable.
To show how serious the problem is in Finland, a Finnish-language teacher I spoke with on Saturday from Kouvola said that no politician would ever carry a sign in public stating that we should give more financial support to refugees and immigrants.
One important lesson that we could learn from Ireland is that racism must be seen as something unacceptable in our society.
Why? Because it is a direct threat to our society, our values and our common sense of decency.
Racist political rhetoric must not go unchecked.
___________
By Jennifer Hough
An example needs to be made of politicians who make negative comments about immigrants if Ireland is to avoid going down a route of an “accepted rhetoric or racism”, Integration Ireland has warned.
The lead story in Sunday’s Helsingin Sanomat is about how racism and intolerance at home have tarnished Finland’s image abroad, according to a survey of Finnish expats living in different countries. Even if the daily blames the rise of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party for our country’s questionable image, the real culprits are none other than us.
What Helsingin Sanomat forgets to tell its readers is that such a negative international image will cost us dearly, especially during a time when we need more skilled immigrants and foreign investment in our country.
The economic damage caused to Finland by our near-silence and the vacillating stance of our media and too many politicians to racism and populism is a big one. The longer we remain quiet on this front and flirt with our silence with parties like the PS, the more we will continue to destroy our good image abroad.
Before Finland’s entry into the European Union in 1995, the foreign ministry worked hard to improve our negative international image caused by Finlandization. While our refugee policy and draconian treatment of immigrants before 1983, when Finland’s first Aliens’ Act came into force, officials ran the Aliens’ Office like a state within a state.
Issues like racism took backstage in the international media because of Finlandization and due to the size of our underwhelming immigrant population, which totaled about 7,000 in the 1970s. Most of these “foreigners” were native Finns who were naturalized citizens of other countries.
The experiment by 19.1% of the population in the April election to seek the help of a populist, anti-EU, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim party to lead us in this decade is proving to be a mistake.
There are positive signs, however, that voters have had enough of the PS’ political shenanigans as the presidential election showed.
Apart from voters giving the thumbs down to anti-EU presidential hopefuls like Center Party’s Paavo Väyrynen and PS’ Timo Soini, the party has been damaged by numerous scandals in the media that have exposed the racism, homophobia and anti-democratic credentials of some of its MPs.
When I grew up in the United States, most if not all of our most popular television series kept us doped in a fantasy world where the only people that counted were white Europeans who spoke English. We read history as well but there was too little about the “other” USAmericans: immigrants, Latinos, blacks, Native Americans and a long list of others that built the United States.
Like democracy, the cultural diversity of a society should have representation.
If cultural diversity were used as a yardstick to measure our level of respect for different ethnic groups and their participation in our society, most of the countries of the world would be run by despotic regimes were the voices of these groups are either underrepresented or neglected.
A question: Why do ethnic groups exist? Why are they more marked in some societies and less in other ones? Is group privilege the real culprit?
We have seen throughout time many battles won by minorities over unjust political systems that scorn and exclude such groups. One of the most powerful forces that has, however, challenged such segregated systems and succeeded is the power love.
It’s incredible to note that only 45 years ago there were still laws in the United States that prohibited in 16 states people of different ethnic groups marrying. In the landmark Loving versus Virginia case, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ban on interethnic marriages. Mildred Delores Jester Loving and Richard Perry Loving were criminally charged in Virginia, where interethnic marriages were banned.
Loving: Grey Villet's photograph captures Richard Loving kissing wife Mildred as he arrives home from work in King and Queen County, Virginia, April 1965. Source: Daily Mail. *
Despite laws that prohibit people of different ethnic origins from marrying or, worse ones like apartheid in white-ruled South Africa until 1990, some unwritten laws by society are far more sinister. Such written or unwritten laws that exclude and keep different groups apart are nothing more the fruits of the arrogance that racism gives others to justify their domination of political power and society’s wealth.
Those people who marry outside their group are bonded through love. These types of marriages and unions have advanced humankind or “Scientific Adam and Eve” by diversifying the gene pool of future generations. They constantly remind us that culture and ethnicity change.
Could it be that naive view of the world depicted with the help of our subjective history, ethnic view of ourselves and all-white television series reveal what is terribly wrong with us? If we read history and watched more shows that encouraged mutual acceptance, respect and good relations between different ethnic groups in the United States and elsewhere, would we spend less of our energies supporting our simplistic views of the world through war and more on building a more just and democratic society?
The situation in the United States as well as in other parts of the developed world like Europe are equally worrying these days. Some openly confess wanting to return to a fantasy world that was only possible through racism and forced or encouraged segregation of different ethnic groups.
Even in countries like Finland, where an anti-immigration populist party like the Perussuomalaiset won 19.1% of the votes from 4.05% in the previous election, are doing everything possible to portray their society as white as possible at the cost of excluding others.
Greater cultural diversity representation in our society and democratic system are the best way of avoiding the perilous mistakes of our war- and violence-ridden past.
Remember Ulla Pyysalo, Perussuomalaiset (PS) party MP Juho Eerola’s aide? She’s the one who got her fingers burned when her name appeared on a hacked membership list of the neo-Nazi Pohjoismaisen vastarintaliike (PVL). Pyysalo said that she would resign if she found a new job by the end of last year. Well, folks, surprise, surprise… My sources in parliament tell me that Pyysalo is still working for Eerola.
The Pyysalo affair demonstrates beyond any doubt that it is perfectly fine to be a PS member and belong to a neo-Nazi association like PVL as long as you were drunk while applying for membership or didn’t quite know what you were doing but thought it was a patriotic act.
What is not acceptable to the PS, however, is to threaten people’s lives. Hemmo Koskiniemi was informed by Soini that he did not want the Rovaniemi city councilman to run for the party in the October 28 municipal election.
Prior to the death threat, Soini appears not to be worried at all by the racism and xenophobia spread in Koskiniemi’s writings.
Migrant Tales had got in touch with Uusi Suomi, the City of Rovaniemi and Council for Mass Media in Finland (JSN) about a blog Koskiniemi blog entry published on June 7, 2011.
Thus if you are a PS member, it is perfectly fine to get fined for hate speech, spread urban myths about immigrants, pile racist rhetoric deep and high, belong to a neo-Nazi association as long as you are drunk but don’t threaten people’s lives!
What would happen if different ethnic groups switched their roles in society and promoted their history and justification of the domination of other groups? Below is a satirical video clip about that switched view of white Australia’s ongoing program of racism and oppression of black indigenous people.
Setting satire aside for a moment, is the fear that those who oppress us driven by ignorance or by a stark fact: If people ever woke up and understood how they’ve been exploited and deprived, would that lead to a revolution?
A 1960s black activist from Harlem, Elder Lewis Michaux, raises some serious questions even about our integration program in Finland. He said about the black man’s and woman’s plight in the United States: “Integration will never happen. You will never, as long as you live, integrate into the white man’s system.”
Is Finland’s integration program really serious about raising the immigrant, never mind their children and grandchildren, to the same status as white Finns? When can they remove the “immigrant background label” off and be accepted as Finns on their own ethnic and cultural terms?
Here, I believe, we have to look at expectations versus reality. Expectations are noble but the results are so far dismal. The rise of a populist anti-immigration party in April like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) raises a lot of questions not only about where Finland is heading but how passionate we are about ethnic and minority equality in this country.
If you are an optimist you may believe that Finland’s noble social welfare system and the values that give it its reason for being will promote and encourage even ethnic equality. If you are a pessimist, however, you may believe that the social welfare system is only an effective way of brushing the sticky issue of equal rights under the rug.
In order for this society to take that giant first step towards ethnic and social equality, we must have mutual acceptance. How many politicians use the term acceptance in their daily speech?
Is full integration and ethnic equality possible in Finland?
Social Democrat Party presidential hopeful, Paavo Lipponen, has been the most outspoken candidate about the threat of the far right in Finland. On a television debate Thursday, he accused Perussuomalaiset (PS) party far-right MPs like Jussi Halla-aho and Jussi Niinistö of hiding behind Timo Soini of boosting the PS leader’s as well as the party’s popularity.
Setting aside his Islamophobic rhetoric, Halla-aho suggested recently that the Greek military should overthrow the elected government. Contrarily Niinistö is on another crusade to weaken the role of the Swedish-speaking minority in this country.
Niinstö’s far-right credentials come from his association with Suomalaisuuden liitto (Association of Finnish Culture), where he is a board member. Suomalaisuuden liitto is an association that was founded in 1906 but is today firmly under the control of the PS. One of its board members is Teemu Lahtinen, a PS member who belongs to IKL, a fascist party founded in the early 1930s.
Believe it or not, both Halla-aho and Niinstö chair the all-important administrative and defense committee of parliament.
Below is a joint campaign ad for the April 17 election by Halla-aho and Lahtinen. The Hindi turban used on the potato shows the extent of their ignorance. I apologize for the racist nature of the video clip.
It would be naive, even reckless, to think that the PS in general and some of its members in particular are not flirting and promoting far-right ideology.
Niinstö substituted the word “culture” in Johst’s play for parliamentarism.
Certainly Niinstö never mind Soini will never admit they are promoting far-right nationalism at the cost of minorities and our noble Nordic social welfare democracy. If you ask them, they will tell you with a poker face that they are fighting for your rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is one quote by Adolf Hitler and another one by Hermann Göring that help shed light on the sad state of Finland and Europe today. The first one by Hitler is how far-right groups spread urban myths about immigrants and minorities today: Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
The second one by Göring shows how the far right lures new followers: The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
The televised presidential debate on Thursday is probably one of the first times when Perussuomalaiset (PS) party chairman Timo Soini’s good-cop-bad-cop strategy was uncovered to the tee. His usual response, “I don’t support racism and hate speech,” didn’t work because it was unconvincing and even had a grotesque quality.
We should thank again the high school students of the city of Järvenpää for their good question that brought Soini’s political house of cards down.
The question inspired as well other presidential candidates taking part in the debate, namely Paavo Lipponen of the Social Democrats, Swedish People’s Party Eva Biaudet and Paavo Arhimäki of the Left Alliance, to continue to grill Soini and not let him off the hook as easily as in the past.
With young people like the ones we saw on television this week and their good questions, we can rest assured that Finland is in good hands and will not fall victim to nationalistic populism and hatred.
The startling discovery that one will make when studying Soini’s ideology and the PS is that at the end of the day he thinks just like those worst racists in his party. The big difference between Soini and those “bad cops” is that he is a good talker. Soini does not insult any group directly like some of his more cruder MPs.
But don’t be mistaken, it’s the same beast with the difference being that the message comes in sugar-coated words.
There is a very good column by Pekka Vasala of Kainuun Sanomat that catches Soini in his good-cop-bad-cop role.
How can a politician like Soini be against racism and prejudice when he prizes politically people like Jussi Halla-aho with the chair of the administration committee? How can he lead by example if he attracts Nazi-spirited members that belong to associations like Suomen Sisu and SKV? The PS chairman literally shakes your hand with a smile but then clobbers you with the other.
Once we understand how a political beast like Soini and the PS operate, we can begin to tackle an ever-growing social ill in this country: far-right nationalism, inequality, prejudice and racism.
This is not a far-fetched question taking into account what is happening in Hungary and the rise of populism in Finland. How many in Hungary ten years ago could have envisioned what is happening today in that country?
The architect of Hungary’s ever-autocratic grip over its democratic institutions has been Fidesz party prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Daniel Cohn Bendit, the leader of the European Green group in the European Parliament, is not too happy in the video clip below about the reforms that have taken place under Orbán.
Says Bendit: “Europe was born in a struggle against totalitarianism and the basis of democracy, the basis of liberty, is quite precisely freedom of expression. And that disturbs. A democracy never died of too much freedom, democracies died through throttling freedoms.”
Here is a link to a massive protest in Hungary by tens of thousands of people against the government’s reforms.
What we are seeing in Hungary last decade and especially today is of concern: The rise of Antisemitism, xenophobia, hostility towards the Romany minority, increased government monitoring of the media and other institutions like the central bank by the government to name a few.
The guardian.co.uk sums it up pretty well: “…the new constitution is the source of most anguish. It came into effect on 1 January, and, combined with at least 350 laws that have been rushed through during Fidesz’s 20 months in power, has, say critics, all but removed checks and balances to the power of the government and ruling party…There have been crackdowns on Roma rights, and funds for education and social care have been shredded, campaigners say.”
The question that I’d like to ask our bloggers is if Finland could ever follow Hungary’s xenophobic and increasingly anti-democratic path if a party like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) got an absolute majority in the election as did Fidesz in 2010.
Fidesz election victory, which gave them two thirds of the seats in parliament, is as impressive as what the PS gained in April.
Another big winner of the 2010 election in Hungary was the Antisemitic and neo-fascist Jobbik.
If any party were to swing Finland on Hungary’s path, the place to start is the Constitution.
I am certain that there are a lot of sympathizers in the PS and in Finland of the anti-democratic reforms in Hungary.
The more I read about Timo Soini the more I am convinced that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party is a threat to this country, especially to those who do not fit the PS’ narrow view of the world. I am not contesting the election result, which I respect, but what the cat has brought in from the back door.
Marianne Lydén will publish in a few weeks a book, Jag är inte rasist. Jag vill bara ha främlingsfientliga röster [I’m not a racist. I am just out to get the votes of those who hate immigrants], that highlights the role of the media and political parties in fueling the rise of the PS, according to HBL.
Fear = Hate forums in Finland (Hommaforum, Scripta and others), Ignorance = bloggers who visit these sites, and hate = hostility towards immigrants and visible minorities. Thank you Hannele Kosonen for sharing this very revealing cartoon with us.
While we at Migrant Tales have repeatedly criticized the media’s lack of teeth and the complacency of the largest political parties to the xenophobia and racism of the PS, Lydén raises the important question again in her book.
If anything, the media and politicians can learn from their past mistakes and now see what can happen when we are too complacent to parties that hold in contempt the rights of other groups in society.
“We journalists did Soini’s work by spreading his hatred of foreigners sometimes unknowingly,” the staff reporter at the Swedish-language daily HBL is quoted as saying, “but if we wouldn’t have written about him we wouldn’t have been doing our job.”
Lydén points the finger in her book at the following politicians for boosting the PS: Kokoomus MP Ben Zyskowicz, Jutta Urpilainen and Eero Heinäluoma of the SDP as well as Center Party veteran politician Paavo Väyrynen.
While you’ll find the same anti-immigration hardliners in all Finnish parties as in the PS, it explains why a politician like Urpilainen can flirt with Soini’s one-way integration model for immigrants and why Wille Rydnman has been christened by his party as Kokoomus’ Jussi Halla-aho.
The HBL reporter shows how an Islamophobist like Halla-aho and Soini complimented each other in the historic April election. “Without Halla-aho Soini would have never got the anti-immigration vote. Without Soini Halla-aho would not be chairing the administration committee,” she said.
Another important observation that Lydén makes is that nothing happens immediately or by chance in Finland. Racism has been festering in the undercurrent for a long time in Finland. “What is it and nothing of the sort happens [xenophobia] in Finland was the normal answer,” she said of the 1990s.
I have worked as a foreign correspondent and journalist in Finland for a long time and totally agree with Lydén about turning a blind eye to racism, bigotry and prejudice. If you didn’t you were blacklisted by the foreign ministry which did everything possible to smear your good name.
I am certain that Lasse Lehtinen, Rolf Friberg, Pekka Karhuvaara and Finnfacts can give us more details about how the foreign ministry “worked” with foreign journalists during the cold war and tried to convince us that Finlandization did not exist.
We are in big trouble if we deal with this threat of the PS in the same manner as we did before the election.
However, I believe that Finland is slowly but surely learning a stinging lesson from its pre-April 17 mistakes.
