Hitler jokes and conspiracy theories taint Finnish coalition

Just two weeks in office, Finland’s new right-wing government has already had enough excitement and headlines for a whole electoral term – just not for the right reasons.

Helsinki’s new four-way coalition is led by conservative prime minister Petteri Orpo and his National Coalition Party. But when he insisted on Tuesday, after a coalition away day, that that all was well with his far-right coalition partners, the Finns Party, few believed him.

“We had very good, constructive, honest and direct discussions,” said Orpo, “and we have a unified view of what happened.”

What happened is Vilhelm Junnila, who resigned after just 10 days as economics minister over links to neo-Nazis, as well as a record of Hitler jokes and racist jibes.

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He joked about the “excellent” election list place of 88, seen as a nod to a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”; then there was his suggestion that “climate abortions” for Africans would be “a leap forward for humanity”. Finally it emerged that he fabricated work and education experience on his CV.

Prime minister Orpo said Mr Junnila’s resignation – before being fired – was the “right and only possible decision”. The 41-year-old previously survived – narrowly – a parliamentary confidence vote with firm backing from party colleagues. Finns Party MPs have backed their interior and justice ministers, too, despite revelations that they have signalled support for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

This myth – of a concerted plan by European governments to replace the natives with immigrants, at the behest of a shadowy international elite – is popular online and Finland’s security service warned in 2020 it was “a central ideological motivation of extreme-right terrorists”.

On Tuesday the prime minister insisted the security service’s boss, interior minister Mari Rantanen, “has nothing to do with far-right extremism”.

Two days earlier, she deleted a tweet in which she said “we shouldn’t be so blue-eyed” – or naive – “about, soon, no longer being so blue-eyed”.

Two years ago she warned that: “At this rate, Europe will become part of Africa unless the tone and politics change. But some may genuinely want that.”

Another backer of the replacement myth is the Finns Party’s foreign trade minister Ville Tavio, who in February linked population replacement to “EU-globalism” which he called “a new form of fascism”.

The Finns finished second in the general election, less than one percentage point away from first place. They secured seven cabinet posts and a programme for government dedicated to cutting new arrival numbers and allowing for the imprisonment and deportation of illegal arrivals.

The scandals have rocked Finland and the new government. With its narrow majority of nine seats in the 200-seat parliament, just 28 per cent of Finnish voters in a recent poll said they expected this government to last a full term.

“If this government was ever was strong, now it is even weaker,” said Emilia Palonen, a senior politics lecturer of the University of Helsinki. “Time will tell how this is seen: as something to be condemned or something the ‘elites’ have invented against the Finns Party.”