RACISTS IN THE FINNISH GOVERNMENT? NO WAY … OR?

Protesters carrying a sign that says, “THE RACIST GOVERNMENT DESTROYS FINLAND” in Helsinki on September 3, 2023. Photograph: TONY ÖHBERG/FINLAND TODAY

We Will Not Remain Silent! protest pulled 20,000 people together to support a common cause on Sunday afternoon, Sep. 3, in sunny, warm weather: racism is not tolerated in the government, nor, in fact, anywhere in Finnish society.

10,000 or more peaceful protesters gathered at the Senate Square for starters. After a few speeches, where one of the speakers shouted that “there shouldn’t be Nazis in the government,” and was praised by loud applause, the masses began to move along Aleksanterinkatu blocking all public traffic and thus causing a man and a woman in their 50s to swear while pulling colorful luggage bags behind them.

“Look at this!” the man shouted. “They are mad! There are at least 20,000 of them.”

“They should go the Parliament Building, goddamn!” the woman exclaimed.

The couple continued walking against the crowd that was marching toward them with sluggish steps while chanting slogans, such as “We don’t want racists anywhere!”

While asking where the couple was going they said they were hurrying to the Silja cruise ferry to Sweden after arriving at the city center from the outskirts of Itäkeskus.

“There was nothing about this on TV, nor the radio,” the man said. “There were not supposed to be any delays in the public transport. And now we have to walk!”

Not too much later, demonstrators specialized in climbing walls were exercising their talents against the facade of a stone-walled building rising above the main street Mannerheimintie.

The building is a favorite among student unions that typically gather to talk and share heavy drinks on the top floor. The building used to host a club called Virgin Oil on the ground level where Finnish rappers arranged VIP parties and could easily pull 30 people past the queue on a weekday. But the club is now long gone, a sort of victim of bad times and the pandemic, and the protesters were on top of the building with a huge placard that said in capital letters “NO TO RACISM” in Finnish, Swedish and English.

When their friends below passed the building and saw their daredevil counterparts hanging on the wall by ropes, they cheered loudly in unison. One protester on the roof wearing a yellow helmet raised his fist in the air like Robert Helenius.

The crowd moved slowly toward their final destination: Töölönlahti Park, a big area covered with grass next to the Töölö Bay.

Mannerheimintie, which runs next to the bay behind the trees was jammed with cars. The road at this location was torn apart because of construction work on the pipelines below the street. And now, the masses made it impossible to move forward for a long time, and, so, many cars simply found a way to turn 90 degrees, rumble back and forth and finally turn completely around and go back where they came from. They, apparently as well, hadn’t seen nor heard the news.

In the Töölönlahti Park musicians performed and speakers shared words on a big stage in Finnish and English.

According to my notes, the word “Nazis” was referred to at least three times in the speeches during the protest.

This type of “strong” rhetoric could send the wrong message to the teenyboppers in the front row who were hyperventilating with excitement to watch their new favorite boy band “Kuumaa (Hot)” perform.

The word “Nazis” has also famously been used to justify the war against Ukraine, but so far none has been found there. Nor in the Finnish government.

But if we forget Nazis, for now, a reasonable question is: Are there racists in the government coalition of the National Coalition Party (NCP), the Finns Party (Finns), the Swedish People’s Party (SPP) and the Christian Democrats (CD)?

Riikka Purra (Finns), the minister of finances, for one, has faced turmoil after 185 messages written between January and November 2008 to the guest book of his fellow party member Jussi Halla-aho’s Scripta blog “resurfaced,” when the Finnish media dug them up from the archives of the internet.

The messages were written under the pseudonym “Riikka.” At first, it was unclear if “Riikka” was indeed Riikka Purra, but in mid-July, Purra confirmed in a press conference that the messages were, indeed, written by her. She was then a 31-year-old doctoral researcher at the University of Turku.

Here’s an example of her “sarcasm.”

“Do you know what ‘rustling in the reeds’ means,” Purra writes. “Well, it’s the sound that these darker-skinned male characters make when approaching/then leaving/on escalators/elevators/wherever. It’s not a whistle (too obvious it would be) but a kind of fucking hiss between the teeth—the more excited Abdullah is, the more spit comes with it. It’s hard to control oneself when that happens. But you have to. After all, to look up would be to say, ‘Take me, O Great Man.’”

This summer, Purra caused a stir in the Finnish media when a blog post she wrote in 2019 was finally discovered. Purra, then a member of Parliament, wrote about “unidentified black sacks walking around the capital region.”

The Muslim community in the capital region condemned Purra’s rhetoric as “very racist.”

So far Finance Minister Purra has not given an oral or a blog-posted apology to the Muslims.

To boot, 15 years ago Purra wrote messages that she later referred to as being “sarcastic” about Somalis, Romanians and Nazis.

“Political correctness has been turned on its head … me and my Nazi friends just had a few beers, sigh, and wondered if there’s anything we could do to save the World,” wrote Purra.

Another Finns Party member, Minister of Economic Affairs Wille Rydman, who replaced the former economic affairs minister, Vilhelm Junnila (Finns), a man who was able to keep his ministerial post for about two weeks in the summer before an earlier speech, when he was an MP, surfaced in the media. Reports of Junnila speaking at a far-right event triggered Junnila to resign himself.

After Rydman stepped into ministerial boots he quickly, too, made the headlines when Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat published messages that Rydman, then a member of Parliament in the National Coalition Party, had sent to his former girlfriend. In some of the messages, published widely in the national media and even in foreign news outlets such as Politico Europe, MP Rydman was referred to calling, for example, people with a Middle Eastern background “desert monkeys.”

At this writing, on Wednesday afternoon, Minister Purra and Rydman are sitting in the government box in the Plenary Hall of the Parliament Building discussing the government’s statement to Parliament on promoting equality, gender equality and non-discrimination in Finnish society.

This statement, which was released on August 31, was created by a working group that included “about 100 actors in society.”

“Finland has historically been a leader in social equality, the rule of law and improving opportunities for individuals to lead a life of dignity. Under the Constitution of Finland, everyone is equal before the law,” the statement declares.

Some left-leaning MPs in today’s discussion session in Parliament wondered “how serious the government was in following the statement?” Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) assured that they were very serious. Some MPs thought in their speeches that it was the only way to keep the government together by publicly agreeing to the non-discrimination policy.

Ministers Purra and Rydman stayed mostly quiet during Wednesday’s plenary session. Purra later said in the government box that she had already apologized, but she didn’t say for what exactly and that, in fact, the whole government had resigned from racism.

“My commitment to this statement to Parliament, and the commitment of our parliamentary group to this is quite clear,” Purra said.

While other ministers kept straight faces during the discussion hour, Rydman was mostly smiling nervously and fingering his phone.

But it’s not just members of the government, who have recently been making headlines in Finland and internationally because of their past deeds.

Antti Lindtman of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), who was last weekend elected as the party’s chair, and who serves as an MP, raised eyebrows in the summer in Finland as well when photographs of his youth portraying him wearing nothing but a ski mask and a Christmas hat while holding an airsoft gun while his friends in front of him make a Nazi salute.

Mikkel Näkkäljärvi, who was elected as the party secretary in the same SDP meeting in Jyväskylä, made headlines almost instantly for killing cats with his friends while he was 16 years old. This creep hit a cat with a shovel. 

But what does this have to do with racism? Probably nothing … unless the cat was black. Heh. Heh. This type of “sarcasm” would have surely amused young Riikka.

Huh … writing about our political reality this way is about to leave this writer in a funk. And the government has not really done anything yet. The Parliament has just begun its second term, now, with a new government.

But the 20,000 protesters last Sunday did what they believed was right.

And, try to remember, folks, these people are in the politics because that’s who Finnish people have voted for.