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Openness and Populism According to the Finns Party

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Openness and Populism According to the Finns Party chapter 6 The Nordic Ideal: Openness and Populism According to the Finns Party Ainur Elmgren What is the True Finn party? In my opinion, it is a humane union of peo- ple, a people’s movement defending the human being, built on the foun- dation of liberty, fraternity, and equality […] Openness and honesty, internationalism in the right sense. heiskanen 2008 ∵ The relationship between openness and populism in the political rhetoric pro- duced by the Finns Party (previously known as the True Finns) is ambiguous. The party won a record number of seats in the 2011 parliamentary election, becoming Finland’s third-largest party, with thirty-nine of the two hundred seats: thirty-four more than in the 2007 elections. This success has compelled scholars to focus on the genealogy of protest parties in Finnish politics. Finland has been described as “one of the strongest footholds of European populism” because of fifty years of continuous activism, beginning with the Finnish Rural Party, a protest movement from the 1950s growing into a coalition member in the 1980s, and continued by the Finns Party, founded by a spin-off group of the former in the 1990s (Jungar and Jupskås 2011, 29f). The self-descriptions of senior members in the Finns Party organ Perussuomalainen (The True Finn) reveal identification with the former party, which claimed to represent the ‘forgotten people’ of rural Finland (Ruostetsaari 2011, 107). The decline in popularity of the Finnish Rural Party after the fall of the Soviet Union has been explained as a consequence of participating in gov- ernment and thus losing credibility as a protest movement. The extended depression of the 1990s raised new support for a reinvented version of the party (Jungar 2011). It was not an immediate success. Founded in 1995, it did not gather broad support until the approach of the 2008 recession, which coin- cided with an electoral financing scandal that tainted the reputations of several major parties. While Finns Party members have previously resisted the populist label, the party adopted a self-defined brand of ‘populism’ as its © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004281196_007 <UN> 92 ELMGREN ideology in the parliamentary election programme of 2011 (henceforth referred to as the ‘2011 programme’). This chapter analyses the connections between populism as self-identification and the increasing demands for openness (avoimuus) directed by party activists against the government. Critics often claim that the Finns Party promotes a closed society. I argue that openness as a concept in their political ideology, now self-defined as populism, rests on an essentialist view of the nation state and ele- ments of xenophobia, and is used as a tool for exclusion. Exclusion as a political strategy is not unique to the Finns Party in Finnish politics. It is their choice of terms, intended to differentiate themselves and emphasize their innovative char- acter, which sets them apart, not their political goals. The source material for this analysis is the party organ Perussuomalainen from 2004 to 2011, as well as election programmes and published manifestos from 1995 to 2011. The party organ, a tri-weekly newsletter, contains contribu- tions by activists, interviews, and presentations by candidates in municipal and national elections. Although the party’s share of public communication funds increased to three million euros after its success in the 2011 parliamentary elec- tions, the publication still only employs two part-time editors (Kallionpää and Räikkä 2012). However, the party intends to revise its homepage into a new forum for open debate and renew its newsletter with the help of Matias Turkkila, one of the founders of the anti-immigration Internet forum Hommafoorumi (Rantanen 2012). The paper lacks a public editorial policy, but one may assume that it directly represents the party leadership’s communication with members and constituents. It can be used to investigate the role of various interpretations of openness in creating a party line based on its version of populism. Voter turnout in the 2011 elections reflected distrust of the establishment, particularly the political or media elite, and occasionally big business as well. Many voters must have found the 2011 programme appealing and credible, although it is difficult to determine how many actually read it. The media, how- ever, focused on xenophobic, racist, homophobic, and sexist statements by party members, depicting the Finns Party political agenda as exclusive and iso- lationist. The party has been described as “nationalistic, tough on immigration, and highly sceptical of the European Union” (Bartlett, Birdwell, and Littler 2011, 28). It supports a strong welfare state and egalitarian social policy, but many of its supporters are also vocal opponents of same-sex marriage and adoption rights for homosexual couples (Jungar and Jupskås 2011, 52; Bartlett, Birdwell, and Littler 2011, 107f). Despite of this, the current understanding of populism within the Finns Party is that it does represent a unique and more efficient means to achieve openness. Openness has been proposed as a cure for disillusionment with democracy, and the methods advocated by the Finns <UN>.
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