Could Timo Soini be kingmaker in a new Finnish government? Flickr/UKIP pix. Some rights reserved.“We are here in our homeland because we are needed. Today is payday!” Timo Soini, the charismatic leader of the Finns Party, declared in his trademark colloquial rhetoric when the results of this year’s General Election were confirmed. The Finns Party finished second, winning 38 seats out of 200 and narrowly pushing the previous winner, the centre-right National Coalition Party (NCP) to the third place with 37 seats. As polls had suggested, the Centre Party took the lead with 49 seats.
To the astonishment of both their supporters and opponents, the Finns Party had repeated their historical 2011 success, when the party gained just over 19% of the vote. At the time, this meant that a 4 MP party was in one go elevated to 39 seats. I wrote about the Finns in 2012 after they had triumphed again in the year’s Municipal Elections. Back then, the staggering rise of this populist and nationalist party was making headlines all over the world as yet another sign of Europe’s worrying slide towards far-right politics, anti-EU sentiments and xenophobia. However, while nobody doubted that the Finns Party had real support, not many would have counted on the party to hold on to their popularity all the way to the next election. So, what brought Soini’s payday around for the second time?
In his article, Gareth Rice suggests that denial of the difficulties the country is about to face is built into the Finnish culture, and that the Finns Party with their populist and nationalist agenda offer the voters an opportunity to “bury their heads in the sand.” A look at the Finns’ election manifesto, and the recent developments in the coalition negotiations that the party is now engaged in, certainly reveals many displays of suitable sandpits.
