“We are scared and ashamed and terrified,” said Sofi Hakkinen, with her arm slung around her boyfriend’s neck outside the Finnish parliament. “This is not supposed to be happening, but it is.”
Hakkinen was one of a thousand – mainly young – people who gathered outside Finland’s parliament on Wednesday evening to protest at the far-right links of ministers inside the new government, described by analysts as the most rightwing administration in the country’s history, and its austerity and immigration-cutting programme.
It came after a chaotic week for the new administration – formed just two weeks ago – as the economic affairs minister, Vilhelm Junnila, from the far-right Finns party, narrowly survived vote of no confidence, forced after it emerged he had given a speech to a 2019 event attended by neo-Nazi groups and made a joke referencing “heil Hitler”.
In a move described by one senior conservative MP as “completely exceptional”, seven MPs from the Swedish People’s party – a junior partner in the coalition – voted against Junnila with its three remaining MPs abstaining. He survived the vote with 95 MPs supporting the minister and 86 voting against him.
Finland’s longest-serving MP, Ben Zyskowicz of the conservative National Coalition party (NCP) – who suffered an antisemitic attack while campaigning in March – abstained from voting.
He said his party strongly condemned “Junnila’s flirting with and joking about the Nazi symbols”, but the NCP, which came first in elections earlier this year, had given him a vote of confidence in order to put its new programme into practice and “save Finland’s economy”.
On his own decision to abstain, Zyskowicz said: “The reason for this was that personally I didn’t want to give Mr Junnila confidence, because the points I described […] show such poor judgment on his part,” he said. “Naturally, I also didn’t want the government to fall.”
Opposition leaders said 12 members of the opposition were absent from the vote, which could have passed with their support. “This vote was a wake-up call,” said the leader of the Left Alliance parliamentary group, Jussi Saramo. “For us it is impossible to accept that there is a far-right presence in our government. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the government has such a narrow majority that I cannot see that it will last.”
Junnila apologised last week after footage emerged of him addressing a 2019 event by the Coalition of Nationalists, a far-right umbrella group, containing the now-banned neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement, and the far-right, anti-immigrant vigilante group Soldiers of Odin.
Photographs from the event show members of extreme rightwing organisations standing on the opposite riverbank behind Junnila as he spoke. In the same year Junnila joked about the number 88 at a Finns party event, used by the far right as a code for the “heil Hitler” Nazi salute, with 88 referring to “H”, the eighth letter of the alphabet.
“First of all, congratulations on an excellent election number. I know it is a winning card. This 88 refers, of course, to the two ‘H’s, but let’s not dwell on that,” Junnila said, according to an election report by the Finnish state broadcaster Yle.
Junnila, who also hosted the nationalist group Suomen Sisu in the Finnish parliament last October, apologised for “mistakes” he had made, later adding in a tweet: “I hope it is clear to everyone that I strongly and absolutely condemn the Holocaust, antisemitism and all antisemitic acts.”
Critics have noted that as the minister of economic affairs, Junnila is a trade ambassador for Finland – whose biggest trading partner is Germany. “It is extremely damaging for Finnish trade,” said Saramo. “If [Junnila] goes to Germany or Israel to get some foreign investments, what is the first thing he is going to be asked about?”
Junnila is not the only government politician to be criticised for having links to the extreme right. The speaker of the house, Jussi Halla-aho, a previous leader of the Finns party, was fined by the Finnish supreme court in 2012 over comments that linked Islam to paedophilia and Somalis to theft.
Outside parliament on Wednesday protesters – including leftwing groups, families and immigrants as well as several hundred, mainly young, Helsinki residents – criticised the government’s programme which plans to slash spending, cut immigration and tighten rules around citizenship.
Fedor Labovkin, 25, held up a sign saying: “I don’t pay a third of my salary to be treated like shit.” Originally from St Petersburg in Russia, the structural designer said the new policies would deter skilled migrants. “These policies are not only bad for immigrants, they have no benefit for Finland,” he said.
Fabrizio Pineda, 43, who came to Finland seven years ago from Honduras, said during the pandemic he had felt like a VIP as a worker in a care home. “I feel like I am Finnish, I have sisu,” he said, referring to the Finnish trait of stoic determination. “They say this is the happiest country in the world, but how can it be now?”
Hakkinen, who said she would continue to attend protests against the government, said she was fearful of the future of Finnish youth, and Finland’s change of direction. “Finland has been in the spotlight because of [the former Finnish prime minister] Sanna Marin,” said the 33-year-old. “But this is a whole different world now.”
