2006-10-15 HS: Right wing populist True Finns Party facing fundamental questions

[Ant.]

Helsingin Sanomien juttu perussuomalaisista ja Halla-ahosta vuodelta 2006. Kylläpäs herättää muistoja. Pannaan tämäkin kirjoihin ja kansiin. Viestin liitteenä on muutama mukava kuva artikkelista. Lisää artikkelin kuvitusta löytyy lopussa olevasta linkistä.

Right wing populist True Finns Party facing fundamental questions

By Merituuli Ahola

An urban SUV is parked in front of the main door of the Rauhala holiday centre. The licence plate of the massive Volvo reads DAN-1.
      The real parking area has slightly more ordinary family vehicles: Opels, Mazdas, and Toyotas.
      And one Jaguar.
      It is champagne-coloured, and will not fit on the gravel road. The Jaguar has been driven into the middle of the unmowed lawn.
      Judging from the cars, the people gathered here represent a somewhat varied group.
     
If the parking area is full, it is even more crowded in the small meeting room of Rauhala. It is there that the Parliamentary candidates of the True Finns are honing the party's election themes, their image, and their campaigns.
      Finland's smallest Parliamentary party hopes to become the biggest winner in the elections in March. It wants to get as many as seven more seats, in addition to the three that it holds now.
      "The True Finns will get exactly as many seats as they have the courage to take", says party chairman Timo Soini, inspiring the crowd. The True Fins are indeed doing fairly well now. In the Presidential elections in January, Soini got 103,000 votes, only 2,000 fewer than the Greens' Heidi Hautala. This is a pretty good result from a party whose total popular support has usually been a smaller percentage than the margin of error of opinion polls. Even now, its polls do not show much more.
      Still, the result is a victory for a certain figure from Espoo, who has brought the True Finns a measure of credibility that they have wanted for a long time, doubling its popular support. The previous time, in the Parliamentary elections of 2003, the True Finns got 44,000 votes. Now they got more than 100,000.
      Such a result is a considerable boost for anybody.
      And at least here, the faith in the success of one's own people is considerable. Jarkko Korpi of Espoo introduces himself as an upcoming candidate for Parliament. He is the man from Saarijärvi who drove the Jaguar.
      The black t-shirt of the white-bearded Korpi reads PerusMotoristit ("True Motorcycle Drivers"). He invented the term the previous day with his friend. "Both of us have motorcycles, so we decided to have the t-shirts printed."
      In the spring Korpi walked into the party office of the True Finns.
      "I said that I can get 5,000 votes right away.
     
And who knows. Korpi might just pull it off.
      Political scientists have been waiting for about ten years to see who reaps the votes of the concrete suburbs, where the turnout has been shrinking for decades.
      Especially in Helsinki, the urban districts can be divided on the basis of voter turnout into those where the going is strong, and those where it is not. The most reluctant to vote are young people, the unemployed, and those with the lowest level of education. Men vote less frequently than women.
      For the traditional political parties, these reluctant voters could bring many votes, but traditional politics does not interest them. In fact, the opposite is true.
      Timo Soini, on the other hand, has a following, including 21-year-old Tiina Kallio, the chair of the Kontula group of the True Finns.
      "The high voter turnout for Soini got me inspired about politics. The man was the only one who spoke in a way that people could understand."
      Kallio is working for Martti Holmström, Kontula's own candidate. Neither have any previous political experience. The True Finns are not a party that people join through university politics, or through traditional political academies. The Kontula group was set up in a bar.
      So let's pay a visit to Kontula, which is an interesting neighbourhood for the True Finns in many ways .
     
On a Saturday in September a group of members of the local branch of the True Finns has set up a small campaign booth near the local shopping centre, where passers-by are sold snacks, and given balloons. The stand is conveniently near a cafe, which makes it possible to get electricity, and whose outdoor tables provide an audience.
      Timo Soini is the star of the evening. When he speaks, grown men stand in line in silence, holding their hands behind their backs.
      He is different from other politicians. At the corner of the shopping centre, Eero Heinäluoma is called a hay stack.
      The leader of a workers' party is sharply dismissed by members of the working class, even though people do vote for the SDP here. In the Presidential elections, more than 60 percent of residents of Kontula voted for Tarja Halonen. However, for the crowd gathered at the True Finns' campaign booth, Halonen is too soft.
      People here want tougher action, by both the police and politicians. In the tent, a woman selling snacks mumbles that at least Interior Minister Rajamäki is doing his job.
     
Political scientists say that right-wing populism might inspire many indifferent voters to cast ballots - and this is what the True Finns are counting on.
      The previous time Tony Halme got people on the move. He surprised both the political scientists and the journalists covering the elections.
     
Yes, Tony Halme indeed (see links). Before the previous Parliamentary elections, Halme, and candidates like him, were not taken especially seriously.
      After the elections, the fresh MP was patted on the back and even praised for raising the voter turnout.
      Even now, after many missteps, Halme's success is seen as a milestone in Finnish political history - even as a service to democracy.
      Or then a disservice.
      "So, are you one of those friends of Halme?" asks a group of men sitting in the open-air bar. Soini shakes the men's hands and answers something vague. The Halme statements come automatically. We must support our friend, he is a sick man, it is a personal tragedy.
      The people at the corner table are satisfied. "Really nice that you came by."
      However, a man in his 40s standing next to Soini is not satisfied. He pushes his face uncomfortably close to Soini and shouts: "Throw him out of the party!"
     
If they are to be successful, the True Finns need a conspicuous figurehead. Soini is a good candidate for the party, but even he is not acceptable to everyone. One of Soini's pitfalls is his oldest theme: opposition to the EU. Experts say that it still has some appeal in rural areas, but not necessarily in the urban concrete suburbs, and it is in the cities where the fate of the neo-right will be determined.
      In the urban environment the issues are quite different, say the researchers, and Halme latched on to those different issues. He took immigration as his issue - in a stark manner, using the language of the common people. As a result, he got the fifth-highest number of personal votes - 16,000.
      It is issues, such as the immigrant question, that the large parties feel unable to talk about without feeling awkward, that are efficient election themes for small parties.
     
One of the people to notice this has been Jussi Halla-aho, a candidate of the True Finns in Helsinki. He maintains a blog, where he writes unhesitatingly about the immigration theme. There are several thousand visitors to the pages every week.
      Halla-aho is staunchly a single-issue candidate. He feels that multiculturalism is not richness, and that it will prove to be too expensive for the welfare state.
      But it is unlikely that Halla-aho will be the second Tony Halme. "I am probably a bit elitist for these people", he admits. Dr. Halla-aho is a lecturer at the University of Helsinki, lives in the expensive neighbourhood of Eira, and is visiting Kontula for the first time in his life.
      And right-wing populist votes do not come on the basis of an appealing agenda alone. In addition, you need charisma - the kind that would overshadow even Halme and Soini.
      Perhaps the Prince of Ghana might work. Such a person can be found at the Ylöjärvi seminar.
     
A large middle-aged man stands on the porch of his red-painted house and speaks , making massive gestures. "Welcome to my humble abode."
      He is the same man, whose fancy cars include the black urban SUV that was parked in front of the Rauhala holiday centre. Here in Ylöjärvi, there is a dark grey Porsche in the yard. The licence number reads DAN-3.
      Carl J. Danhammer, a businessman and a Parliamentary candidate of the True Finns is, indeed, a Ghanaian prince.
      Danhammer's personal history is dazzling. In the 1980s he changed his name from Jouko Juvonen to Carl J. Danhammer. He made his fortune in the construction business. It brought him to Sweden, and ultimately sent him to prison for financial crimes. Danhammer has both Finnish and Swedish citizenship, and he has also applied for citizenship in Estonia, where he lived for seven years, running his own restaurant. In Estonia he also recorded a music record and began to call himself Estonia's Elvis.
      In Finland he is known as the former manager of ski-jumper Matti Nykänen and as the former husband of Estonian actress Anu Saagim. Now he is involved in the gold business in Ghana.
      "I am kind of a jack of all trades, who helps others do business. I don't do anything myself."
      Be that as it may, in Ghana Danhammer is important enough to have been crowned a prince last spring - a title similar to that of an honorary consul.
      This is why his rural house in Ylöjärvi has both the Finnish flag, and the red, yellow, and green flag of Ghana. The head of the household himself has a light blue outfit resembling pyjamas, and leather sandals on his feet, with golden crocodiles as ornamentation. He says that Ghanaian Parliamentarians wear such outfits.
      If it were up to Danhammer, he would change everything and everybody in Parliament.
      "We don't need people like [singer and Centre Party MP Mikko] Alatalo and [former Miss Finland, Centre Party MP, and Minister of Culture Tanja] Karpela [who has a new married name Tanja Saarela] - singers and beauty queens. A minister has to look like a minister. Just like Reagan, for instance. He looked like a great man. Or then the new Prime Minister of Sweden. You can tell from far away that the man has charisma."
      He would also eliminate visas, legalise brothels, and give his own paycheck to charity.
     
Is this what Soini means when he says that a good politician must speak so that the people understand him?
      Let us return to Rauhala, where Soini explains to the party's coming candidates that knowing what to say is important, as is being able to understand one's own words.
      "It is not enough for the mouth to be moving. The product has to be in shape", Soini says.
      This is the thorn in the party leader's side. Soini is not especially happy with ostentatious candidates such as Danhammer, but on the other hand, colourful characters are needed to attract the attention of those who have been alienated from politics, and to get them to return to the polls.
      Soini emphasises, however, that in these elections a candidate must bring along more solutions than problems. "It's all right to be colourful, but not a clown. If the cup overflows before the official list of candidates as been set up, I won't hesitate to give a red card. In a small group, one person's mistakes are more visible".
      Indeed, populism has its pitfalls.
      Listening to discussions by candidates in Rauhala, it is difficult to find common election themes.
      The lowest common denominator appears to be that each candidate feels that he or she is somewhat different from other candidates.
     
Political scientists have been waiting for years for the new right to get a strong foothold in Finland, as has happened in France, Belgium, and Italy.
      Compared with its sister parties in other European countries, the True Finns are rather tame. However, political researchers have a different explanation for why populism has not yet made a dent in Finland.
      For some reason, social marginalisation does not channel itself into a political movement in Finland. Finns prefer to not vote at all. Or then there is not quite enough bitterness smouldering in the suburbs.
     
The True Finns face an unexpected rival in the elections: the conservative National Coalition Party.
      In Central Europe, the new right has been most successful in situations in which the main parties of the right and left have been in the government.
      In Finland, the National Coalition Party has been in opposition during this electoral term, and it has no need to defend decisions that the government has made. It can afford to run a flashy election campaign. This can eat into the True Finns' vote.
      This does not come as a surprise to Soini. "Remember, friends, your head needs to stay intact", he told the True Finns' candidates before dinner.
      "Realism is good. I have always won fewer votes than I expected."
      Except last time.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.10.2006

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Right+wing+populist+True+Finns+Party+facing+fundamental+questions/1135222378936

[Jussi Halla-aho]

Muistan elävästi tuon jutun. Hesarin valokuvaajalle täytyy antaa pojot.

[ketale]

Hyvät naurut näin iltapäivän kunniaksi noista kuvista 

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